The best books on how we as societies can thrive in the challenges ahead

There is a lot of talk about why some societies are successful while others are not. Why do some remain poor while others stumble on a path to growth and development? Often the excuse it is someone else’s fault. Stefan Dercon’s is an unusual voice in this rather noisy crowd, with his simple claim that growth happens when its leaders want society to succeed rather than just profit themselves. To do so, they must gamble on increasing the size of the economic pie rather than carving up the one that already exists. This is risky. Politicians often claim that they know what to do, but not how to get re-elected afterwards. Read this book and at least you will know what to ask for from your government.

A thousand years ago, a traveller to Baghdad, Constantinople, or China would find vast and flourishing cities of broad streets, spacious gardens, and sophisticated urban amenities; meanwhile, Paris, Rome, and London were cramped and unhygienic collections of villages. Europe was then a backwater. How, then, did it rise to world pre-eminence over the next several centuries? Having experienced China and its epic growth since being in Student in Shanghai in the early 1980s and then later as a banker, it seems there could be something to learn from history. Daly avoids the twin dangers of Eurocentrism and anti-Westernism, strongly emphasizing the contributions of other cultures of the world, as well as the vibrant and internal competition among cities and nations of Europe.

Governments' Ridiculous Budget and Pension Accounting "Would make Enron blush" Bill Gates once said. Having worked with balance sheets in both the private and public sectors, I bear witness to the sad fact that governments all over the world are obsessed with a focus on cash. They do not even have the faintest interest in learning from what has created wealth in the private sector, adopting proper accounting in order to meet the multitude of challenges facing our society.

Jacob Soll presents a sweeping history of accounting, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennium of human history to reveal how accounting has shaped kingdoms, empires, and entire civilizations. Perhaps we can learn some rather old lessons from this surprisingly exciting history of accountancy. Or pay the price of our own ignorance.

Would you rather that your local football team or even the national team was selected through family ties or political connections? How did meritocracy—the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their birth—become the world's ruling ideology? Why is meritocracy now under attack from both right and left? Adrian Wooldridge shows what transformative effects it has had everywhere it has been adopted, especially once women were brought into the meritocratic system. He also shows how meritocracy has now become corrupted and argues that the recent stalling of social mobility is the result of the failure to complete the meritocratic revolution. Rather than abandoning meritocracy, he says, we should call for its renewal.

What system is best suited to deal with all of the challenges that we face? The frustration and anger with Democratic capitalism are understandable. Democratic capitalism remains the best system for human flourishing. But something has gone seriously awry: the growth of prosperity has slowed, and the division of the fruits between the hyper-successful few and the rest has become more unequal.

But citizenship is not just a slogan or a romantic idea; it’s the only force that can save us, Wolf argues. Nothing has ever harmonized political and economic freedom better than a shared faith in the common good. This epic human story of the dynamic between democracy and capitalism concludes with the lesson that our ideals and our interests not only should align but must do so. For everyone’s sake.