40 books like The Case for a Job Guarantee

This one’s by a member of the home team—a former student, colleague, collaborator, and fellow MMT conspirator.

Kelton was an advisor to Bernie Sanders, served as chief economist for the Senate Budget Committee, and is a frequent guest on all the important media outlets. She explains the basics of MMT and why they are important—especially right now as Congress is hog-tied trying to figure out what to do to prevent Uncle Sam from defaulting as we broach the debt limit.

This choice is obvious and tough.

The book is notoriously difficult. However, it ranks with Darwin’s Origins of the Species, and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as among the most important and revolutionary books ever.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Keynes changed everything in the same way that Darwin and Einstein had. It will change the way you see the world if you make the substantial effort. Keynes argues that it is the organization of our economy around money that causes unemployment—not high wages or lazy workers.

Here’s my one sentence summary: firms only hire the number of workers they need to produce the output they expect to sell at a profit. If they cannot make money from hiring you, you are unemployed.

Yes, that Margaret Atwood!

The one whose book, The Handmaids Tale is targeted by book banners. This one is more subversive, covering money from every angle—religious, historical, literary, ecological, and psychological—not limited to the economic perspective. She provides a fascinating dive into money’s nature in five short chapters that transcribe a series of entertaining lectures she gave on Canadian radio.

If you’ve ever wondered why so many words related to money (redemption, debt jubilee, balance) have religious overtones, she explains why. She’ll help you to understand the relationship between Saint Nick, patron saint of thieves and pawnshops, and that other red-suited (and sooted) Old Nick who also keeps track of who’s been naughty. As they say, “time compounds all debts” but “death pays all debts.”  

It is my favorite book on the nether side of money—debt.

This is based on a lecture given by Grierson in London in 1970. (Do you see a pattern? Lectures can make entertaining books.)

He was the world’s most famous numismatist (expert on coins). A professor at the University of Cambridge, UK, for seventy years (!), he spent most of his salary collecting medieval coins, donating 20,000 of them to the university’s museum—the world’s premier collection. But coins were invented around 700 B.C., while money has been around for 6000 years.

In this book he speculates on money’s origins (in Babylonian temples)—linking it to the ancient practice of Wergeld (blood money). He hypothesized that money originates as a measure of debt owed to victims. Hence, the link of money to debt and sin made by Atwood. Money is not a “thing” but a record of indebtedness.

Today, it is tax debt that drives money: you work hard to get money to… show more.

I was one in a world of frustrated and increasingly anxious people back in 2018. Politicians just weren’t talking about the severity of the environmental crisis and the vast actions that we need (and can) undertake to tackle it. And then Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and Fridays for the Future, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal, and the Sunrise Movement came along. Suddenly everyone was talking about it. This set of essays brings so many of those thinkers and doers together to give us an inspiring road map for getting out of the crisis and realizing a better world in the process. And it shows us that these movements are built on the shoulders of giants, particularly in the global south. 

This book had an enormous impact on my understanding about the long road economic conservatives and corporations took to establish the dominance of neoclassical and neoliberal economic approaches in the U.S.

It tells a detailed story about a small group of American businessmen who ultimately succeeded in building a political movement that transformed the country. It describes what they were heading for and the ways they went about it. 

Sandwiched between the creative outpourings of the Harlem Renaissance and the Cold War, Black cultural expression during the Roosevelt years is often overlooked. Lauren Skalroff corrects this by exploring the various venues where Black artists contributed during the New Deal era. Black cultural workers encountered overwhelming discrimination as they navigated the world of art, theater, music, writing, radio, film, and other cultural outlets that were controlled by white Americans. But the New Deal’s arts programs did offer some opportunities for Black artistic autonomy and genuine expression. In some cases, Black artists were able, to a degree, to challenge negative stereotypes. Sklaroff builds the story chronologically and takes the reader through WWII showing how culture and political activism were intricately linked during two of the nation’s most historically challenging times.

I grew up listening to my elders about the 1930s. I’ve read dozens of books about that decade,  and this is the best in terms of the documentation of average Americans. We absolutely must understand the 1930s to deal with what faces us in the nation and world in the 2020s. Adamic was an immigrant who believed in the potential of America, and about half of this book is his reporting around America, with a focus on the working class. The other half is memoir. The reporting is deep, the writing beautiful. 

A collection of exceptional scholars explore what replaced the New Deal Order’s focus on economic justice at the end of the 1970s with a regime that came to be known as neoliberalism.

This very accessible book approaches the possibility of new forms of life known as solidarity economies and with it a turn toward social-economics.

I appreciate the attempt this history book makes to both take a long view and to create a conceptual framework regarding empirical cases.

In a pathbreaking examination of the New Deal and race, Patricia Sullivan does a deep dive into how the Roosevelt administration’s policies played out and, in most cases, failed Black people. While that story is a disappointing one, she also shows how the era created opportunities for a biracial coalition of Black and white progressives to come together to push for a vision of a revitalized American Democracy based in racial equality. Sullivan offers compelling accounts of the dynamic leadership provided by the NAACP, Black New Dealers, and Black activists in challenging American racism as they worked with white allies. It was these interracial crusades that began to flourish during the Roosevelt era that would provide a model for later collaboration during the Freedom Movement campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s.