The most recommended books about the economy

How many, and which individuals should be allowed to immigrate to the U.S. is a long-standing policy dilemma that people feel strongly about yet appears to have no easy solution.

Economist Borjas shows us how economists think about the issues involved. Where are we in the history of immigration to the United States? Which American industries and individuals benefit from allowing more immigrants in, and which are harmed by such a policy?

What policies would be better for the U.S. economy and the U.S. population as a whole? How are regions, states, and cities differentially affected? What trade-offs are involved in the available policy choices in this area?

Tooze uses his mastery of economic sources to construct a brilliant, often startling, reinterpretation of Nazi geopolitics. He offers a comprehensive economic interpretation of the Nazi drive for expansionism in the 1930s, Hitler’s decision for war in 1939, and the timing and shape of the Barbarossa offensive against the Soviet Union in 1941. The Wages of Destruction also explores the economic dimensions of Hitler’s plans to liquidate the European Jews and other racial enemies. Perhaps his most arresting argument is that the rise of the United States as an economic superpower in the early twentieth century drove the politics of German ultranationalism between the wars.

Professor Butler’s classic book is a foundational work in the realm of African American business history.

Combining both sociological and historical analysis, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black Americans includes case studies of notable African American business districts.

For instance, years before recent interest in the horrific destruction of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” in 1921, Butler provided an in-depth examination of this phenomenon.

This book is also valuable because it provides an important comparative analysis of historic African American entrepreneurship with that of various nonwhite immigrant groups.  

For readers interested in undocumented immigration, especially from Mexico, Minian’s book provides important and necessary historical context for present-day issues. In particular, the book explains how undocumented immigrants were caught in the middle of economic and political policies in the United States and Mexico. As the title implies, the lives of these immigrants are at the heart of the story, including how these much broader systems impacted their individual lives.

For thousands of years, right down to the present, textiles and weaving in the Andes has been some of the most exquisite and sophisticated in the world. It has been linked to the amazing cultural creativity of people in the Andes and the rise and fall of successive empires because controlling textile production is controlling power and wealth.

This book shows us something entirely new: how the weavers who made these amazing textiles experienced and often resisted that power and the exploitation of their labor. Even though this book is not explicitly about Afro-Andean people, they were an integral part of the Andean labor force, and they figure in histories of resistance and rebellion in the Andes.

William Dalrymple and Anita Anand’s Empire podcast series has been transformative in the understanding it has generated and the audiences it has reached in the last year (1 million plus in January 2023 alone).

The Anarchy is one of the core books of Dalrymple’s extraordinary research and scholarship which has changed our understanding of the generation and development of the British Raj in India and which brings into view more clearly and accurately than ever before, the toxic legacy of the East India Company and its company state apparatus.

Yet unlike some other authors, Dalrymple is content to let the facts speak for themselves and does not idealise the world of the Mughals and native princes. In an era of propaganda and revisionism, The Anarchy utilises the empirical data of the Enlightenment at magnificent scale to expose some of the savagery—on all sides—of the Enlightenment era. 

At one point in her excellent study, the author writes, “Generations of historians have painted the industrial revolution in relentlessly dark colours: a force which was wholly destructive for the poor, remorseless, unforgiving in its grinding down of the independent labourer of old. This, clearly, is not the assessment of those who lived through it.” The basis of her claim is a survey of over three hundred autobiographies written by English laborers of the time. Though she expected her readers to be surprised, since workers are famously supposed to be the leading rebels against the onset of “capitalism,” those who have read the other titles on my list will be less surprised. Their messy and eclectic array of passions and interests will seem altogether familiar.

Gary Mormino ranges far and wide across the landscape and boundaries of a place that is at once America's southernmost state and the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. From the capital, Tallahassee--a day's walk from the Georgia border--to Miami--a city distant but tantalizingly close to Cuba and Haiti--Mormino traces the themes of Florida's transformation: the echoes of old Dixie and a vanishing Florida; land booms and tourist empires; revolutions in agriculture, technology, and demographics; the seductions of the beach and the dynamics of a graying population; and the enduring but changing meanings of a dream state.

Waring, a former MP for New Zealand, wrote what I consider the foundational book in feminist political economy. Removing the scales from our eyes in this book, she questions how it is that when an oil tanker spills, that event adds to the GDP of a nation, but when a woman gives birth to a baby, that event adds nothing to the GDP. She was the first to note that the “production boundary” stipulated by the male-created GDP indicator completely invisibilizes—even erases—the enormous contribution of women, simply because it is unpaid and performed for members of the same household. Waring then goes further and asks how this gendered approach to understanding economic success actually destroys our goal of sustainable, functional societies.

Development aid is a type of foreign aid that is directed at the economic development of recipient countries. The failures of government-to-government development aid in Africa are Moyo’s focus. She notes that Africa is the only region that is regressing in major socio-economic indicators. She argues such aid distorts African economies, enables corruption, and incubates a culture of aid dependency. African governments can afford not to provide public goods because their revenue is guaranteed by development aid. To remedy such externalities, Moyo wants to end development aid to Africa. Instead of aid, she prefers free trade with the West and foreign investment from China. This book is remarkable for its willingness to challenge the conventions in development aid. Sometimes, we need to call a spade a spade. 

If you read one book about the history of slavery, this should be it. This brief volume sums up decades of Wright’s scholarship about how the institution of slavery shaped virtually every aspect of American economic development and left a lasting imprint long after Emancipation. It is concise, eye-opening, and insightful. It also offers a broader lesson in the ways in which economic institutions affect aspects of behavior in unanticipated ways.

In his characteristically funny and sardonic style, Andersen guides us through the historical connection between corporate America and the Republican Party. Needless to say, the relationship has been strong and fruitful (Democrats are guilty as well, but it’s hardly a comparison). He reports on the key conservative figures in both the private and public spheres who have funded and enabled the transformation of our laws and society. It is a remarkable story of power and greed written in concise witty prose. Highly recommend!

We tend to think of social relationships in societies like early eighteenth-century Jamaica in male terms – masters and enslaved men. Jamaica was a very masculine place with a distinct masculine culture based around sexual access to women and a vibrant economy. But white women were also there and tended to flourish – working with the slave system rather than against it. This book is testimony to gender history and to the diversity of experiences in colonial Jamaica.

By offering free taxi rides in Shanghai, long-time NPR correspondent Frank Langfitt opened his ears to a wide variety of ordinary Chinese from all walks of life. Due to the pandemic, Americans haven’t been able to travel in China lately, so this is the closest a reader can get to actual conversations with Chinese people about life in China today. Most do not seem oppressed!

The insistence that migration is a ‘crisis’ has led to a greater willingness to take enforcement as more urgent than human rights. Todd Miller’s book is a moral argument about the costs of that bargain. He argues that the powers given to those who enforce borders have led to abusive and violent practices at the border—and, increasingly, within the United States itself. The book is sobering, but important—and it should worry all of us, citizen and migrant alike.

The book that has come closest to making me think it may really all be about oil after all! Or energy at least. Although written before the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine, Thompson shows that the origins of the war go back far beyond 2014 or even 1991, but rather lie in the 1950s – when Anglo-French power in the MENA region was broken, first by the 1956 Suez War and then by Algeria’s secession from France in 1962, which in turn would lead to West Germany becoming dependent on the USSR for energy – a dependence that lasts to this day. Her account of the geopolitical consequences of the US fracking revolution is superb – prompting me to think that the Ukraine war can be seen as a battle over who will supply the European energy market. Once the LNG terminals in northern Europe are built, the US has… show more.

This book captures the decline of the traditional job—stable, well-paid, with a good chance of moving up—between World War II and the end of the 20th century. Wartzman is a clear, engaging writer who tells gripping stories about workers, bosses, chief executives, and politicians to explain what the old “social contract” between big companies and American society was, and why it disappeared. But he’s also particularly good at not overly romanticizing the earlier era, when huge swaths of people—like women, people of color, immigrants, the disabled, and others—were cut out of the workforce by prejudice and racism. This book makes business and labor history engaging and entertaining, even while it will make you mad about how bad things have become.

The title of this book is doubly surprising. Is North Korea enterprising? And North Korea “in the world economy”? Isn’t it the hermit kingdom? Hastings picks up a theme that was central to our work on the famine: that the socialist sector in North Korea has undergone a secular decline while households and entrepreneurs have constructed a complex market economy that is partially above ground, partly below it. But Hastings goes further, showing how that market economy is integrally tied to China. And the book has the added attraction of focusing attention on lucrative black markets that range from amphetamine to counterfeited one hundred dollar bills. 

The breadth of Meredith’s book makes it a true masterpiece. He covers the political history of virtually every African state from independence through the end of the century. Each chapter is as compelling as it is brutal.

I love this book for two reasons. It condenses a massive amount of economic history into a small book, and it shows how our unequal societies are backtracking to older models of the economy.