Books like Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

01

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

Both dig into power.

02

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond · Science

Guns, Germs, and Steel is Jared Diamond's attempt to answer a question posed to him by a Papua New Guinean politician named Yali: why did Europeans end up with so much cargo — wealth, technology, power — while other peoples had comparatively little?

Both dig into inequality.

03

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Yuval Noah Harari · Philosophy

Where Sapiens traced humanity's past and Homo Deus speculated about its future, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century plants itself in the present.

A kindred economics read.

04

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Homo Deus picks up where Sapiens left off, but turns to face the other direction.

A kindred economics read.

05

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein · History

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, published in 2007, argues that free-market economic policies — privatization, deregulation, cuts to social spending — have historically been implemented not through democratic persuasion but by exploiting crises and disasters that leave populations too disoriented and traumatized to resist.

Shares political economy and power with Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.

06

Goliath

Matt Stoller · Economics

Goliath is Matt Stoller's history of monopoly power in America, arguing that the concentration of corporate power in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is not a novel development but a return to a pattern that Americans once recognized as a fundamental threat to democratic governance — and successfully resisted through antitrust law.

Both dig into political economy.

07

Poverty, by America

Matthew Desmond · Economics

Poverty, by America is Matthew Desmond's follow-up to Evicted, and it makes a more explicit and polemical argument: poverty in the United States is not a natural condition or a problem of insufficient resources.

Both dig into inequality.

08

The Divide

Jason Hickel · Economics

The Divide is Jason Hickel's argument that global poverty is not a natural condition that development has failed to fully remedy, but a product of policies — colonial extraction, debt regimes, trade rules, and structural adjustment — that wealthy countries have imposed on poor ones.

Both dig into development.

09

The Great Transformation

Karl Polanyi · Economics

The Great Transformation is Karl Polanyi's 1944 account of how a self-regulating market economy emerged in nineteenth-century England, what social catastrophe that emergence caused, and why the market society created its own political reaction.

Both dig into political economy.

10

The Rise and Fall of American Growth

Robert J. Gordon · Economics

Robert Gordon's argument is one of the most carefully constructed and most contested in recent economics: that the period from 1870 to 1970 was a singular century of transformative invention, and that we have been living with the deceleration ever since.

Both dig into inequality.

11

The Second Machine Age

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee · Economics

The Second Machine Age is Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's argument that digital technology has entered a qualitatively new phase — one in which machines can perform cognitive tasks previously reserved for humans, creating economic disruption and opportunity simultaneously.

Both dig into inequality.

12

The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith · Economics

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is Adam Smith's comprehensive account of how modern commercial economies work and what policies promote prosperity.

Both dig into political economy.