100 books like Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games

Olympics organizers love to produce economic impact assessments claiming that hosting this mega-event will boost the local economy by astronomical amounts.

Andrew Zimbalist is an economist who painstakingly illustrates why this is never the case. Circus Maximus is written for a lay audience, rather than an academic one, and is easily read even by us non-economists.

He clearly and methodically demonstrates how and why the Olympics and World Cup have never made money for their host cities, and likely never will. 

If you want a broader overview of where the modern Olympics came from, why they have persisted, and what major issues they continue to face, look no further than Understanding the Olympics by John Horne and Garry Whannel.

This book is now in its third edition, and with each update, Horne and Whannel keep the book on top of the most recent Olympics shenanigans. Although not exclusively critical of the Games, Horne and Whannel provide a thorough overview of the pros and cons of these massive mobile mega-events.

This is the grand-mere of contemporary critical Olympic literature.

Helen Lenskyj was one of the first scholars to draw attention to the problematics of the Games, including human rights abuses, displacement of homeless populations, and elite scandals that ought to send law-abiding citizens running. It continues to be a powerful and relevant read for anyone interested in peeking behind the curtains of the Olympic behemoth.

John R. Short is another scholar who has been blowing the whistle on the hidden costs of Olympic Games, especially for host cities, for many years.

In this recent release, written for a popular audience, he provides some history of the Games, but, more importantly, a step-by-step breakdown of why the Olympics costs cities much more than the IOC or bidding committees would like you to believe.

He also includes a thorough list of ‘further reading’ resources (and my book plus almost all of the authors on this list are on it!).

My view of markets has been heavily influenced by my colleague from the Sociology Department downstairs, Neil Fligstein.

He follows Polanyi in posing a direct challenge to the basic assumptions of economics. He argues that firms seek stability, not necessarily profit maximization. That is, they want to stabilize prices and keep the firm intact.

He also brings power to the center of his view of markets. Incumbent firms engage in power struggles. They use business strategies, like collusion, and political strategies, like lobbying for favorable regulations, to insulate themselves from disruptive competition.

This book is one of the most effective attacks against the market tendency to commercialize any good, ending up corroding what is most intrinsically human in social relationships and in people's intimate lives.

The effectiveness of the book lies in the examples, ranging from the sale of kidneys to paying someone to be substituted in the queue.

The most important lesson of the book is that market-driven economic growth has not only transformed the environment to make our lives more comfortable, thus hitting the limit in environmental degradation, but it has also transformed ourselves, because it has made us more consumers and less human.

This silent transformation - the philosopher Sandel teaches us - must be limited.

I was born at the end of the 1980s and the majority of greenhouse gas emissions have been released in my lifetime. That means the world’s emitted more since Seinfeld was first broadcast than in the previous 10 millennia of human history. But this isn’t just a story of the last few decades or of certain bad technologies that use fossil fuels. It’s a story going back centuries, to the emergence of global systems of profit-making that impelled people across the world to seek people and nature to exploit for money. This book has been invaluable in helping me understand that history and in seeing the environmental crisis foremost as a crisis of politics and of the great economic systems that dominate our world. 

Mass democracy guided the 20th century. Socialists and liberals disagreed about what exactly a government “of, for, and by the people” would look like, but they agreed that, in principle, it was desirable.

Even the fascists agreed. “Fascism,” wrote Mussolini, “is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered from the point of view of quality rather than quantity... a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live.”

But by the end of the century, democracy gave way to another ideal: special “zones” punched holes in the image of a democratic nation state with micro-nations and gated communities, crypto-currencies and special economic zones, charter schools and AirBnB schemes.

Slobodian's Crack-up Capitalism traces the emergence of this new social ideal. It examines the theory and practice of privately managed spaces erected to protect capitalism from democracy, markets from politics, profit… show more.

One of the disadvantages to writing a book with any economics in it is just that, readers need to know a little economics to get the most out of your book.

But to grasp how oil and the dollar interact and why we wind up in repeating financial crises, you don’t have to go back and reread Keynes and Irving Fischer (on interest rates). In 2009, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller wrote this easy-to-read and easy-to-understand book that critiques traditional economics (e.g. it’s dependence on “rational” actors) and dissects the building blocks one needs to know to grasp the ins and outs of economic cycles.

Importantly, they explain why people continue to believe they can make a fortune by investing at the top of the market (the confidence multiplier and contagion). Their book leads the reader through the basics on how bubbles (irrational exuberance) and panics ensue… show more.

This is the first book I read about the role of entrepreneurs in the economy. I have mixed feelings about it.

It’s filled with insights but it is also deeply flawed. Entrepreneurs drive economic development and engage in “creative destruction.” The market is about change rather than equilibrium. These are both great insights.

But history has refuted Schumpeter’s Nietzschean view that entrepreneurship is confined to “captains of industry” with unusual personality traits, and his attempts to explain business cycles is unpersuasive.