10 books like A Capitalism for the People

Acemoglu and Robinson note that a productive and orderly society requires a government strong enough to protect the rights of its citizens, but that a government with sufficient power to protect people’s rights also has the potential to violate their rights and oppress its citizens. The power of government can be constrained by a strong civil society to balance that government power. Because societies are best off when the power of government is balanced by the power of civil society, there is a narrow corridor where the two are balanced. They discuss the challenges of remaining in that narrow corridor.

This is one of the most influential books on economic globalization written in the last decade, and it will certainly continue to be crucial to understand the future of globalization.

Rodrik’s Globalization Paradox pinpoints the key policy trade-offs in a globalized economy: If policymakers opt for “hyper-globalization” while insisting on national decision-making, they could find their societies in the “golden straitjacket” of global capitalism.

Alternatively, they could give up sovereignty to democratically legitimized “global governance”.

As the latter is difficult to achieve and often unacceptable to national policymakers, Rodrik argues for limiting hyper-globalization.

The existence of a globalization paradox as well as Rodrik’s conclusion, has been hotly discussed, but the ongoing debate only proves the importance of his book.

Banerjee and Duflo examine poverty at ground level, far from grand debates about the miracle of market competition vs. the necessity of aid and instead closer to the people who actually experience poverty. The entire book is centered on a simple question: What works? And how can we figure out what works? The authors have combined economics with psychology and empirical methods to understand the foundations of how the poor make decisions: the answer, it turns out, is that the process follows human decision-making everywhere. The challenge is that circumstances surrounding poverty make “good” decisions much more difficult. The practical approach to poverty pioneered by Bannerjee and Duflo earned a well-deserved Nobel prize in 2019.

Hata, a Korean, adopted by a Japanese couple, serves the Japanese Army as a medic in World War II. His job is to care for enslaved Koreans who serve as “comfort women” to Japanese soldiers. His experiences are the material of nightmares. Years later he leads a deceptively quiet life in a small town in New Jersey with his Korean adoptive daughter. It is deceptively quiet because his unresolved war experiences, presented in flashbacks, haunt him. I admired the abrupt manner in which Chang-Rae Lee interrupted Hata’s uneventful life with horrific memories.

The author’s method felt like the triggering of those who have suffered trauma and continue to relive events as PTSD. This approach of interweaving past with present inspired my depiction of a young German woman living a quiet life on a primitive Icelandic farm, milking the cows and raking the hay, while being repeatedly interrupted by memories of… show more.

I am greatly impressed by the breadth and ambition of this book. It covers China, Japan, and India and is consequently truly transnational in scope. The book also attempts to relate intellectual history or the history of philosophy to problems that we face today, such as how we can transform our practices to that we can avoid environmental disasters. Duara argues that Asian traditions, given their stress on the interdependence between human beings and nature, might be able to help in this path. Duara’s book poses an important question, namely how to connect Asian intellectual history to concrete problems related to global capitalism. 

The rise of nationalistic populism and the backlash against globalization have been of particular concern to me in recent years.

This new populism has stimulated a lot of research and many books. For me, however, Eichengreen’s book stands out in three ways.

First, it builds on valuable lessons from history; second, it skillfully and in a highly readable way summarizes what current research is saying; and third, it offers constructive policy recommendations to contain populism.

In particular, Eichengreen advocates economic and political reforms to address the concerns of the disaffected.

As a European studies scholar, I particularly recommend reading his ideas for reforming the European Union to make it more immune to a populist backlash.

Rajan’s book is an underappreciated perspective on what’s happening in markets today. Rajan is best known as the economist in 2005 who warned the financial community of the impending 2007 financial crash and was criticized for being misguided. In his 2019 book, he notes the problems of the first two pillars (Big Business and Government) in these financial crises and the importance of the third pillar (the Community) is solving the problem. Rajan and I agree on this notion, as the “Community-Based Supply Chain” is the foundation for my solutions needed in today’s communities and US economy.

This book is very emotional and affecting to read for me. It presents two of the earliest autobiographical accounts from American women, with an introduction by Sharon Halevi. As they trace their lives, they depict a world in which childhood, as modern readers understand, does not exist, and even young women need to navigate the intricacies of their controlling and patriarchal world. I often ask what has changed and what has unfortunately stayed the same.

Growing up, I moved from one culture to another, and I know being a teenager can be difficult. The lives of teenage girls are complex, even more so for the children of Asian immigrants, who not only face the pressures of school and society but also serve as cultural mediators, negotiators, community builders, and bridges between the many worlds they grow up in. His book looks at the lives of Asian American girls and their roles in globalization and boundary crossing as they struggle, dream, grow, and thrive. As an immigrant myself, I connected to many of the ideas in this book.

Latour was not one of my favourite thinkers before I read this book. I‘ve found him an interesting person to engage with, in person, and to read in the past, but I rarely found myself really agreeing with him very much. But this book has changed all of that. The title is translated from French—a better translation would be A Place to Land.