Cheap Coffee

I love this book because it is so depressing. This book does an amazing job of exploring and explaining the economics of the coffee industry, especially as it affects farmers. It paints a grim picture (hence the depression), and it does not try to sugarcoat anything.  The global coffee industry is incredibly complex, and this book tries to explain it to us.

I struggled with some of the economic concepts (this book, too, opens with a deep dive into economic academia). However, for the most part, those struggles didn’t interfere with my understanding of the essential ideas in the book.