100 books like What Money Can't Buy

What is human development to have real economic and social progress?

Creating Capabilities written by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum is perhaps the book that best explains what human development is according to the Capability Approach, originally conceived by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen.

The explanation distinguishes between internal individual capabilities and environmental opportunities that give the freedom to exercise them. In this way, the author links the psychological aspect with the socio-economic aspect of capabilities.

The main purpose of the book is normative, that is, to recommend what government should do.

But it leaves open the question of why economic growth does not automatically lead to human development.

I love this book because it summarizes in a few pages a lot of scientific work on a very slippery and thorny topic: early education.

It is not a self-help book; it does not provide detailed advice to parents. It rather demonstrates three principles that can inspire policy as well as educators’ actions.

First, people’s skills and personalities are not determined only by genes, but can be changed as the environment interacts with genes.

Second, inequality due to the birth lottery is not diminishing in the US, but is rather increasing.

Third, investing in adolescent education could enlarge inequality, whereas investing in the quality of early education improves both equity and efficiency, and is much rewarding.

Will policies be able to be so far-sighted and to intervene on parenting?

Are we able to use free time, once secured our livelihood, to make life happier?

The Joyless Economy provides a negative answer, as the title already suggests.

The book is premonitory because Scitovsky wrote in the 1970s referring to the United States, while today Americans say they are less happy, despite the economic and technological progress since then..

Scitovsky was still original in explaining this puzzle: the pursuit of happiness in the comfort of material goods and social approval has prevailed over the pleasure of learning, as children do when they play, and then over the pursuit of ambitious life goals.

I loved this book because, although drawing on the psychology and neurosciences of the time, it gives valuable insights for understanding today's world, such as consumerism and the education crisis.

I like this book because it does not simply show how income inequality affects happiness inequality, thus suggesting that unhappiness is just a sign of material disadvantage.

The book also links income and happiness to hope, which is a feeling that motivates people to plan and invest for the future. 

To convince the sceptical reader about measuring hope and happiness, Carol Graham provides an abundance of empirical evidence.

But being an economist, in addition to telling emblematic stories, she reports evidence based on large samples and international data.

It is a challenging book, but rewarding, because it helps to understand both how the exhaustion of the American Dream will affect the future, and where to look for new hope.

It reads like a great novel but is a great work of non-fiction. The subject is India’s capital as it undergoes massive change and growing polarization. The book gets under the surface of change to reveal some of its costs and consequences. The book is a great blend of reportage, political critique, and sympathetic accounts of the varied citizenry, from the very wealthy to the very poor. A fascinating and empathetic account of rapid change in one of the city's largest cities in one of the world's most populous countries as it both fashions and is impacted by globalization. 

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.

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. 

To build wealth, we need an environment that allows for unequal outcomes. The Friedmans argue that using societal or governmental force in the name of equality will destroy the environment where we are free to choose how wealth is grown. In their words: Freedom “preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.” Let the market determine the outcome. Bad ideas will wither away, and good ideas will thrive.

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.

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.