Here are 100 books that The Just Economy fans have personally recommended if you like
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F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed, “there are no second acts in American lives.” But I am on my third. I started out in the theatre, then became a lawyer, and then a political philosopher. What drove each move is that I was always outraged by injustice and wanted to find a better way to fight against it. For me, reading, writing, and teaching political philosophy turned out to be that way. The books on this list provide important lessons on how certain economic policies can cause injustice while others can cure it. Each has been around for a long time, but they are as relevant today as when they were first written.
How can a society as rich as ours leave so many people behind?
Published in 1958, this book opened my eyes to the importance of economic justice—I first read it in the late 1970s when I was nineteen.
But it is still mind-blowing today, for neither the wrongheadedness of prevailing economic policy nor the solutions that are available for us to do better have changed.
John Kenneth Galbraith's international bestseller The Affluent Society is a witty, graceful and devastating attack on some of our most cherished economic myths.
As relevant today as when it was first published over forty years ago, this newly updated edition of Galbraith's classic text on the 'economics of abundance', lays bare the hazards of individual and social complacency about economic inequality.
Why worship work and productivity if many of the goods we produce are superfluous - artificial 'needs' created by high-pressure advertising? Why begrudge expenditure on vital public works while ignoring waste and extravagance in the private sector of the…
F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed, “there are no second acts in American lives.” But I am on my third. I started out in the theatre, then became a lawyer, and then a political philosopher. What drove each move is that I was always outraged by injustice and wanted to find a better way to fight against it. For me, reading, writing, and teaching political philosophy turned out to be that way. The books on this list provide important lessons on how certain economic policies can cause injustice while others can cure it. Each has been around for a long time, but they are as relevant today as when they were first written.
A renowned economist and Harvard professor with a bit of a cult following, Schumpeter provides a realistic evaluation of what capitalism is and whether it can survive if it does not do more to help a wider range of people.
First published in 1942, Schumpeter’s fear was the rise of socialism, but what he had to say about the failings of capitalism back then applies with equal force today.
Schumpeter was the originator of the term “creative destruction” to describe how capitalism works, and Part II of the book was the inspiration for my paper, “Can Liberal Capitalism Survive?”
“Joseph Schumpeter’s classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy explains the process of capitalism’s 'creative destruction' — a key principle in understanding the logic of globalization." — Thomas L. Friedman, Foreign Policy
In this definitive third and final edition (1950) of his prophetic masterwork, Joseph A. Schumpeter introduced the world to the concept of “creative destruction,” which forever altered how global economics is approached and perceived. Now featuring a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning Schumpeter biographer Thomas K. McCraw, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand where the world economy is headed.
F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed, “there are no second acts in American lives.” But I am on my third. I started out in the theatre, then became a lawyer, and then a political philosopher. What drove each move is that I was always outraged by injustice and wanted to find a better way to fight against it. For me, reading, writing, and teaching political philosophy turned out to be that way. The books on this list provide important lessons on how certain economic policies can cause injustice while others can cure it. Each has been around for a long time, but they are as relevant today as when they were first written.
I would have recommended John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which is one of the great masterworks of the twentieth century, but reading Keynes himself can be difficult.
Hansen’s book is the best summary available despite being more than 70 years old. And understanding Keynes is essential if you want to understand how certain economic policies continue to lead us astray.
F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed, “there are no second acts in American lives.” But I am on my third. I started out in the theatre, then became a lawyer, and then a political philosopher. What drove each move is that I was always outraged by injustice and wanted to find a better way to fight against it. For me, reading, writing, and teaching political philosophy turned out to be that way. The books on this list provide important lessons on how certain economic policies can cause injustice while others can cure it. Each has been around for a long time, but they are as relevant today as when they were first written.
A series of essays by one of the most respected Canadian political philosophers of the twentieth century.
I have recommended this book for the title essay, which provides a particularly insightful account of how people have thought about economic justice (or haven’t) over time.
In his final book, one of the giants of twentieth-century political philosophy returns to his key themes of state, class, and property as well as such contemporary questions as economic justice, human rights, and the nature of industrial democracy. Macpherson not only re-examines historical issues dealt with in his earlier works, such as the impact of Hobbes's economic assumptions on his political theories, but assesses the problematic future of democracy in a market society. This new edition includes an introduction by Frank Cunningham that places the book in the broader context of Macpherson's work.
To me, political and moral questions have always seemed intertwined. My career as a political theorist is dedicated to using philosophical argument to untangle the moral questions surrounding real-world politics. I am especially interested in ethics and international affairs, including the ethics of intervention, what a just world order would look like, and how our understandings of familiar ideals—like justice, democracy, and equality—would change if we thought they were not only meant to be pursued within each nation-state, but also globally, by humanity as a whole. As faculty in Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University, I explore these issues with colleagues and students alike.
Every so often, I encounter a piece of writing that is so good—so clear, so well-argued, so thought-provoking, such a needed response to what came before—that it is simply a joy to read. To me, this book is one of those pieces. (If you plan to read it, some prior familiarity with John Rawls’ Original Position thought experiment would be helpful.)
Many think that our participation in shared institutions means justice requires us to safeguard the welfare of our country’s most disadvantaged people. Beitz makes a compelling case that, if this is true, our shared participation in an interconnected global economy means justice also requires us to safeguard the welfare of the most disadvantaged people in the world, no matter their country of origin.
In this revised edition of his 1979 classic Political Theory and International Relations, Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice of a state's domestic institutions, and a…
I’m a Boston-based educational researcher and consultant specializing in critical-thinking education and technology-enabled learning. My 2013 Degree of Freedom One-Year-BA project on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which involved taking 32 online college classes in just twelve months, was featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education and other publications. That work led to my first book for MIT Press, and an Inaugural fellowship at HarvardX, the organization at Harvard responsible for MOOC development. I am also the author of two books on critical thinking and work with educators on how to improve critical-thinking education for students at all grade levels.
Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting sadly passed away right before COVID, but not before writing countless articles, many of them on the New York Times philosophy website The Stone, showing practical uses of the philosophical tradition. Many of his thoughts are collected in his 2015 book What Philosophy Can Do which includes chapters on how philosophical practices can help us better argue about politics and religion, better understand the power, nature (and limitations) of science, and how to think about education and art. Gutting’s thoughtful and insightful writing provides practical ways to navigate a contentious age using tools that have been helping people argue about and even solve difficult problems for over two thousand years. For anyone laboring under the delusion that philosophy is an exercise in abstraction, suitable for the classroom and research symposium, but little else, What Philosophy Can Do will cure you of that stereotype.
In What Philosophy Can Do, Gary Gutting leaves the ivory tower to tackle difficult questions in everyday life and shows how philosophy can be used as a method for interrogating our world-and one another. He looks at why today's political debates are so polarised, why scientific research on happiness does not make us happier and whether there are convincing reasons to believe-or not believe-in God.
Gutting takes the most powerful-and divisive-forces in our society: politics, science, religion, art and capitalism-and applies a philosopher's scalpel to reveal thoughtful ways to look at vexing issues. He introduces readers to analytical tools, from…
I've always been interested in trying to make the world a better place, increasing the well-being of families and nations, and not just in making private profit for myself or for some employer. In working as a consultant on education and development in 22 different countries, many of them poor and developing such as Nepal, Malawi, and Indonesia, I've seen a lot of poverty and inequality, and have also come to see how education, including its effects on fertility rates, health, longevity, the survival of democratic institutions and so forth and especially its financing is at the heart of making lives better, especially for children who are the future of each family and each nation.
I recommend this collection of articles because it gives a readable and clear view of the connection of the benefits of education to education finance and brings in for the first time the distribution of both the benefits and the costs of education.
Kern Alexander is well known as the father of equity as it relates to education and education finance. His article on the “Concept of Equity in School Finance” which is Chapter 10 in his book sets the stage for 9 additional articles that follow on essentially all of the key aspects of distribution of the benefits among children and families and of costs among families and taxpayers.
This follows the nine Chapters on economic efficiency in education, which explore in greater depth many of the aspects already introduced above. These include the “Human Capital Approach” by Theodore W. Schultz, “The Social and Economic Externalities of Education”, “The…
This book concerns the rationale for efficient investment of public financial resources in public schools and the equitable deployment of those resources. It is a collection of the writings of scholars who have turned their attention to these issues and have published thoughtful articles in the Journal of Education Finance and its predecessor organization, The National Educational Finance Project. The Journal of Education Finance has been published for 33 years and over that long period has been the source of many outstanding articles of which the chapters in this book are representative. The 19 chapters were chosen because they combine…
I discovered philosophy while still in high school and was lucky to study with some of the most exciting philosophers of the twentieth century in college and graduate school. I then taught philosophy in several of America’s great universities for fifty years myself. I have been fascinated by the philosophy of Kant since my first year of college and I gradually came to see Kant’s theory of the value of freedom as the core of his philosophy and a reason to devote a lifetime to studying it. I hope you will find these books as illuminating and rewarding as I have.
This is the greatest work of modern political philosophy. Building on Kant and Mill, Rawls argues that we best express our nature as free and equal beings in a society that maximizes personal and political rights and equal access to public offices and opportunities more generally.
Although liberalism is now under pressure in many places, I believe that Rawls’s defense of its core principles remains as powerful as ever.
Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.
Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal…
I’m a Canadian political economist working in Australia as an Associate Professor in International Relations and Political Economy at the University of Wollongong, just south of Sydney. I’ve been fascinated by the history of capitalism and money since post-graduate school. Eventually I had some time to do a deep dive into the existing scholarly literature on money and have so far written two books on the topic and multiple articles. I hope you enjoy my book recommendations as much as I enjoyed reading them.
Gold has fascinated humanity for a considerable swathe of history, and it continues to do so today.
I saw this book online and immediately had to get it. I already knew that the creation of modern money as debt was fundamentally rooted in war and geopolitics, but I did not know the extensive history of how gold and war were interconnected over 500 years.
I think that this is a captivating study for anyone who is interested in the links between war, gold, and geopolitical capitalism.
A fascinating and essential read for explaining how we arrived at where we are today.
The world was wild for gold. After discovering the Americas, and under pressure to defend their vast dominion, the Habsburgs of Spain promoted gold and silver exploration in the New World with ruthless urgency. But, the great influx of wealth brought home by plundering conquistadors couldn't compensate for the Spanish government's extraordinary military spending, which would eventually bankrupt the country multiple times over and lead to the demise of the great empire. Gold became synonymous with financial dependability, and following the devastating chaos of World War I, the gold standard came to express the order of the free market system.…
As Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Lucas put it, "Once you start thinking about economic growth, it's hard to think about anything else." That's why I am eager to share the best books on economic development with you! I am a Senior Economist at the World Bank, the world's premier development institution. Over the years, I have developed a deep interest in what makes countries prosper, have published extensively on the topic in academic journals, and earned a PhD in Economics along the way. As a development practitioner, I have been supporting sustainable growth across the globe, with working experience in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1990s saw the model of democratic capitalism prevail. Thirty years later, democracy is being questioned, and capitalism has been threatened by growing inequality.
Martin Wolf’s book provides a deep study of the underlying causes of this worrying development, something I very much appreciate. For all its flaws, Wolf argues that democratic capitalism remains the most promising economic model to provide individual freedom and shared prosperity, but it will require a revisiting of the concept of citizenship to foster a shared belief in the common good.
From the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, a magnificent reckoning with how and why the marriage between democracy and capitalism is coming undone, and what can be done to reverse this terrifying dynamic
Martin Wolf has long been one of the wisest voices on global economic issues. He has rarely been called an optimist, yet he has never been as worried as he is today. Liberal democracy is in recession, and authoritarianism is on the rise. The ties that ought to bind open markets to free and fair elections are threatened, even in democracy’s heartlands, the United States…
