100 books like The Coming First World Debt Crisis

Set within the greatest mass migration in American history, Steinbeck’s 1939 classic follows the Joad family as they join nearly three million others who escape the Dust Bowl of the American Midwest.

Usurious banks have foreclosed and crushed the bereft farmers. More than 200,000 refugees head for California, and the Joads join them in an ambling caravan of rattling jalopies. Young Rose of Sharon moves pregnant across the continent, emblematic of both the promise and the peril of the human condition. She’s surrounded by family and hangers-on who ford the wasted continent, only to face a glut of labor in the vast farms of California and the brutal exploitation of the owner classes. The Joads are slapped with the bitter understanding that the promise of California exists largely in myth. Yet always Steinbeck returns to the promises of human connection and even happiness that beckon from just over the next… show more.

I found Mike Davis’s book to be an essential exploration of the historical causes of global hunger. As an aid worker, I found his analysis of the politics of 19th-century hunger relief informative. Food crises often have strong political roots, and this book does an excellent job of putting those into perspective.

It is very well-researched and packed with facts and figures. This book is an essential, magisterial read in a world facing renewed conflict and climate change. 

In the late 1990s, a new type of economy was being born, one dominated by massive corporations, whose logos were increasingly ubiquitous, and who were driving a culture of consumerism among young people.

Klein traced this corporate dominance to a new form of capitalism in which corporations were becoming ever less interested in the stuff they actually made, be it trainers, takeaway coffee, or jeans. Rather, they were selling a brand, and replacing our very notion of ourselves as citizens living in a democracy with one of consumers shopping in a marketplace.

Klein’s book looks at how companies like Nike and Starbucks transformed society – and what people were doing to challenge their dominance.    

“I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalization. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

In 2005, Tony Blair told his party that a new, free-market, globalized form of capitalism was inevitable. Filipino theorist, activists and later politician Walden Bello begged to differ. He believed globalization was a political choice, and one that suited Western elites and their multinational corporations, at the expense of the mass of humanity.

In Deglobalization, Bello sets out to show how things could be different, imagining a more diverse international economy centred on the principle of being as democratic as possible.

As economic inequality has grown exponentially over the past five decades, some of the dispossessed have rebelled. 

Focusing on mobilizations in Brazil, Mexico, and Salvador, Gledhill demonstrates how struggles for social justice are transformed into “threats” to national security, which require “securitization” measures. Through intricate ethnographies, the book documents the deployment of the police, military, and paramilitary to quell domestic disputes.

Protests by students, laborers, migrants, Indigenous, the poor, environmentalists, and human rights activists are subjected to police “pacification” involving state violence, criminalization, incarceration, and sometimes death.

Situating securitization in the context of transnational and global relations generated by capitalist uneven development, Gledhill argues that the logic of capitalist accumulation in the current era is inseparable from repressive violence against “inconvenient” populations.

American economics in the Progressive Era (usually dated from the later 1800s to World War I) is quite fascinating.

Mary Furner’s book is an excellent discussion of the developing American social sciences in this period.

American universities developed rapidly along with the professionalization of the social sciences. At the same time, rapid US industrialization created a raft of new economic and social problems that demanded a response.

This created a tension between the desire for professional “scientific” standing and the demand to respond to obvious social problems by advocating for particular policy responses.

Furner pays particular attention to the work and career of economist H. C. Adams, who was a teacher to a number of the later institutionalist group. In the institutionalist literature, this tension is expressed in the conjoined goals of “science and social control.” 

For institutionalists, the solution to this problem was found in the pragmatic and instrumental… show more.

This eBook, developed by faculty members from top institutions, is available for free from the developers’ website, offers several online resources, it's frequently updated, translated to several languages, and has been widely adopted in several countries.

The book includes both the usual topics for courses on introduction to microeconomics and introduction to macroeconomics, using a similar writing style as other introductory textbooks (assumes no mathematical background), thus being accessible to a wide range of students.

Unlike similar books, however, it structures topics differently: instead of presenting chapters according to the main tool or concept being introduced, chapters are presented according to real-world problems.

While this can help motivate each chapter, it may require some adapting from the instructor’s teaching style.

Immanuel Kant is often seen as a pure philosopher, one who was interested in abstract principles. He was that, but his essays on "Perpetual Peace" and especially his essay "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective" are literally the best things I have ever read, and have so much resonance for us today.

Democracies tend not to go to war as much as dictatorships because the people are likely to be the ones who are killed on the battlefield. In Kant’s time Frederick the Great was able to go to war whenever he wanted. Today, Vladimir Putin can go to war without asking anyone – and the people, and Russian conscripts too – suffer the consequences. Kant’s experience of living in a militarised state governed by a single man is eerily relevant today. Reading this thinker tells as much about contemporary politics as it teaches us about 18th… show more.

John Rawls (or rather, his estate) hardly needs my recommendation. This is the most famous work of political philosophy of the twentieth century. However, it’s a challenging read. Its own publisher describes it as a “600-page work of abstract and uncompromising philosophy.”

Despite the difficulty, the effort is well worth it. Within its pages, you’ll find the most inspiring (and, I believe, realistic) vision of how our countries and our lives can become more just.

I liked this book despite its phlegmatic style and the politics of its author. I liked it because it spoke across a political divide to identify something seemingly quite simple—that is, the friend/enemy divide—yet once unpacked, it became enormously profound and complex.

In identifying something any concept of the political cannot ignore, it cuts across orthodox political divides and political cultures. Indeed, the very first line on the very first page of the first volume of Mao Zedong’s Selected Works begins with this same question of enemies and friends. I liked Schmitt’s book because it opened up a very different way of thinking about Maoist politics.