Economic History

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....

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

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....

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....

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

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

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals....

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from 20 countries, ranging as far back as the 18th century, to uncover key economic and social patterns....

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.

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....

The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq....

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

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....

World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution....

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....

Universal basic income. A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe's leading young thinkers shows how we can build an ideal world today....

A searing exposé of the most scandalous bank in the world, including its shadowy ties to Donald Trump's business empire....

When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change - and charts a way back to the future....

The History of Money explores how money and the myriad forms of exchange have affected humanity, and how they will continue to shape all aspects of our lives....

The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system....

A sweeping, narrative history of Black wealth and the economic discrimination embedded in America’s financial system....

A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world and explains the American instinct to believe in make-believe, from the Pilgrims to P. T. Barnum to Disneyland....

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....

Most people rely only on their life experience to make investment decisions. This causes them to overlook cyclical forces that repeatedly reshape economies and markets. Investing in U.S. Financial History fills this void by recounting the comprehensive financial history of the United States of America. It begins with Alexander Hamilton’s financial programs in 1790 and ends with the Federal Reserve’s battle with inflation in 2023.

Xi Jinping rules over 1.4 billion people and the second biggest economy on earth. He commands huge armed forces and runs a technology programme meant to dominate the globe. His ambition is to take the place of the United States and to change the world order. Xi's life story is full of drama: plots, purges, murders, a power struggle and a pandemic. The book, based on new sources, leads the listener from the poor, isolated China of the 1950s to the modern economic and military juggernaut of today.

In this book, Patrick Bolton and Haizhou Huang offer a novel perspective, viewing monetary economics through the lens of corporate finance. They propose a richer theory, where money can be seen as the equity capital of a nation, playing a similar role as stocks for a company. This innovative framework integrates the real and monetary sides of the economy, with a banking sector and debt at its core.

This small book indeed tells a big story. It is the story of capitalism–of how our market system developed. It is the story of the discipline of economics, and some of the key figures who formed it. And it is the story of how economic forces have shaped world history. Why didn’t Africa colonize Europe instead of the other way around? What happened when countries erected trade and immigration barriers in the 1930s? Why did the Allies win World War II? You’ll find answers to these questions and more in How Economics Explains the World.

In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyzes the economic and social changes brought about by the great transformation of the Industrial Revolution. His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism. New introductory material reveals the renewed importance of Polanyi's seminal analysis in an era of globalization and free trade.