1. Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s All the Devils Are Here
2. Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money
3. Michael Lewis’ The Big Short
4. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom
5. Greg Ip’s The Little Book of Economics: How the Economy Works in the Real World
6. Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance
7. Todd G. Buchholz’ New Ideas from Dead Economists
8. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
9. John McMillan’s Reinventing the Bazaar
10. Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail
11. Gary Stern and Ron Feldman’s Too Big To Fail
12. Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy
13. Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist
I have only read three books on the list so don’t take this as an endorsement of the books. It is however a trust in the ability of the Planet Money guys, whose podcast I listen to very regularly, to pick very interesting and informative books. Click here to see their reasons for picking them. (See the comments of Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog on the list here.)
Which leads me to think of making a list of “must-read” economic anthropology books.
