Economic History

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries.....

If you asked most people what forces led to today’s unprecedented income inequality and financial crashes, no one would say the Federal Reserve. For most of its history, the Fed has enjoyed the fawning adoration of the press....

Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller’s exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book indelibly alters our image of this most enigmatic capitalist....

Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. The pessimists insist that we will reach a turning point and things will get worse. But they have been saying this for 200 years....

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals....

Big tech has replaced capitalism's twin pillars—markets and profit—with its platforms and rents. With every click and scroll, we labor like serfs to increase its power....

Called by H.L. Mencken, "one of the few economists in history who could really write," Henry Hazlitt achieved lasting fame for this brilliant but concise work....

Harvard-trained economist Andrew Leigh presents a new way to understand the human story. From the dawn of agriculture to AI, here is story of how ingenuity, greed, and desire for betterment have, to an astonishing degree, determined our past, present, and future.

The definitive volume on Enron's amazing rise and scandalous fall, from an award-winning team of Fortune investigative reporters....

A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis....

An explosive, deeply reported exposé of McKinsey & Company, the international consulting firm that advises corporations and governments, that highlights the often drastic impact of its work on employees and citizens around the world....

In this unique exploration of the role of risk in our society, Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past.

A real-life thriller about the most tumultuous period in America's financial history by an acclaimed New York Times reporter....

Ray Dalio, the legendary investor and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Principles—whose books have sold more than five million copies worldwide—shares his unique template for how debt crises work and principles for dealing with them well....

A century of expanding government has distorted financial markets, stoked massive inequality, and soaked America in debt. Capitalism didn’t fail, it was ruined. What went wrong with capitalism? Ruchir Sharma’s account is not like any you will have heard before.

The appearance of the famous (and massive) volumes of Rothbard's Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought in a new edition is cause for great celebration. Every paragraph bursts with intellectual energy and the author's fiery passion....

In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way....

Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how the biggest private company in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America....

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are the four most influential companies on the planet. Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. They're wrong....

It’s easy to look at the state of the world around us and feel hopeless. We live in an era marked by war, climate crisis, political polarization, and acute inequality—and yet many of us feel powerless to do anything about these profound issues....

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. This book provides an in-depth account of this era....

The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist behind The New York Times’s “The Morning” newsletter provides a clear-eyed, definitive history of the modern American economy and the death of the American Dream....

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society....

When they met in Philadelphia in 1787, everyone understood real money as Spanish gold doubloons and silver pieces of eight. The Founders hid a clause in the Constitution that allowed states to use pirate money as legal tender....

Levitt and Dubner return with Superfreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first....