Best Political Economy Books
Here you will get Best Political Economy Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Basic Economics
Author: by Thomas Sowell
Published at: Basic Books; 5th ed. edition (December 2, 2014)
ISBN: 978-0465060733
The bestselling citizen’s guide to economicsBasic Economics is a citizen’s guide to economics, written for those who want to understand how the economy works but have no interest in jargon or equations. Bestselling economist Thomas Sowell explains the general principles underlying different economic systems: capitalist, socialist, feudal, and so on.
In readable language, he shows how to critique economic policies in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the goals they proclaim. With clear explanations of the entire field, from rent control and the rise and fall of businesses to the international balance of payments, this is the first book for anyone who wishes to understand how the economy functions.
This fifth edition includes a new chapter explaining the reasons for large differences of wealth and income between nations. Drawing on lively examples from around the world and from centuries of history, Sowell explains basic economic principles for the general public in plain English.
2. Discrimination and Disparities
Author: by Thomas Sowell
Published at: Basic Books; Enlarged edition (March 5, 2019)
ISBN: 978-1541645639
An enlarged edition of Thomas Sowell’s brilliant examination of the origins of economic disparitiesEconomic and other outcomes differ vastly among individuals, groups, and nations. Many explanations have been offered for the differences. Some believe that those with less fortunate outcomes are victims of genetics.
Others believe that those who are less fortunate are victims of the more fortunate. Discrimination and Disparities gathers a wide array of empirical evidence to challenge the idea that different economic outcomes can be explained by any one factor, be it discrimination, exploitation, or genetics.
This revised and enlarged edition also analyzes the human consequences of the prevailing social vision of these disparities and the policies based on that vision-from educational disasters to widespread crime and violence.
3. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
Author: by Thomas Sowell
Published at: Basic Books; Revised edition (June 5, 2007)
ISBN: 978-0465002054
Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the “constrained” vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the “unconstrained” vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible.
A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.
4. Economic Facts and Fallacies, 2nd edition
Author: by Thomas Sowell
Published at: Basic Books; 2nd edition (March 22, 2011)
ISBN: 978-0465022038
Economic Facts and Fallacies exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues-and does so in a lively manner and without requiring any prior knowledge of economics by the reader. These include many beliefs widely disseminated in the media and by politicians, such as mistaken ideas about urban problems, income differences, male-female economic differences, as well as economics fallacies about academia, about race, and about Third World countries.
One of the themes of Economic Facts and Fallacies is that fallacies are not simply crazy ideas but in fact have a certain plausibility that gives them their staying power-and makes careful examination of their flaws both necessary and important, as well as sometimes humorous.
Written in the easy-to-follow style of the author’s Basic Economics, this latest book is able to go into greater depth, with real world examples, on specific issues.
5. The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
Author: by James Dale Davidson
Published at: Touchstone; 1st edition (August 26, 1999)
ISBN: 978-0684832722
Two renowned investment advisors and authors of the bestseller The Great Reckoning bring to light both currents of disaster and the potential for prosperity and renewal in the face of radical changes in human history as we move into the next century.
The Sovereign Individual details strategies necessary for adapting financially to the next phase of Western civilization. Few observers of the late twentieth century have their fingers so presciently on the pulse of the global political and economic realignment ushering in the new millennium as do James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg.
Their bold prediction of disaster on Wall Street in Blood in the Streets was borne out by Black Tuesday. In their ensuing bestseller, The Great Reckoning, published just weeks before the coup attempt against Gorbachev, they analyzed the pending collapse of the Soviet Union and foretold the civil war in Yugoslavia and other events that have proved to be among the most searing developments of the past few years.
6. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
Author: by Daron Acemoglu
Published at: Currency; Illustrated edition (September 17, 2013)
ISBN: 978-0307719225
Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography?
Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest.
The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people.
7. Intellectuals and Society
Author: by Thomas Sowell
Published at: Basic Books; Revised – Enlarged edition (March 6, 2012)
ISBN: 978-0465025220
The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals.
Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals. Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged.
One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society – and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.
8. Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom
Author: by Vandana Shiva
Published at: Chelsea Green Publishing (August 31, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1645020394
With a new epilogue about Bill Gates’s global agenda and how we can resist the billionaires’ war on life This is what globalization looks like: Opportunism.Exploitation. Further centralization of power. Further disempowerment of ordinary people…. Vandana Shiva is an expert whose analysis has helped us understand this situation much more deeply.
Russell Brand Widespread poverty, social unrest, and economic polarization have become our lived reality as the top 1% of the world’s seven-billion-plus population pushes the planetand all its peopleto the social and ecological brink.In Oneness vs. The 1%, Vandana Shiva takes on the billionaire dictators of Gates, Buffet, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as other modern empires like Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Ag, whose blindness to the rights of people, and to the destructive impact of their construct of linear progress, have wrought havoc across the world.
Their single-minded pursuit of profit has undemocratically enforced uniformity and monocultures, division and separation, monopolies and external controlover finance, food, energy, information, healthcare, and even relationships. Basing her analysis on explosive facts, Shiva exposes the 1%’s model of philanthrocapitalism, which is about deploying unaccountable money to bypass democratic structures, derail diversity, and impose totalitarian ideas based on One Science, One Agriculture, and One History.
9. Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto)
Author: by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published at: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (January 7, 2020)
ISBN: 978-0425284643
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A bold work from the author of The Black Swan that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others.
Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life.
As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights: For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do.
10. The War on Cash: How Banks and a Power-Hungry Government Want to Confiscate Your Cash, Steal Your Liberty and Track Every Dollar You Spend. And How to Fight Back.
Author: by David McRee
Published at: Humanix Books (June 23, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1630061531
The War on Cash: How Banks and a Power-Hungry Government Want to Confiscate Your Cash, Steal Your Liberty and Track Every Dollar You Spend. And How to Fight Back is a wake-up call to every one about the tactics being used by governments to restrict the public’s use of cash and to abuse the laws for its own purposes.
Powerful forces are threatening your financial freedom. All over the world, including in the United States of America, governments, certain academics, banks and non-governmental organizations (nonprofits) are working in a coordinated way to stop you from using cash. The War on Cash is a shocking look into the banks and power-hungry government plans to confiscate your cash, steal your liberty, and track every dollar you spend.
AND HOW TO FIGHT BACK!
11. Wealth, Poverty and Politics
Author: by Thomas Sowell
Published at: Basic Books; 2nd edition (September 6, 2016)
ISBN: 978-0465096763
The first volume of a political treatise that changed the worldOne of the most notorious works of modern times, as well as one of the most influential, Capital is an incisive critique of private property and the social relations it generates.
Living in exile in England, where this work was largely written, Marx drew on a wide-ranging knowledge of its society to support his analysis and create fresh insights. Arguing that capitalism would cause an ever-increasing division in wealth and welfare, he predicted its abolition and replacement by a system with common ownership of the means of production.
Capital rapidly acquired readership among the leaders of social democratic parties, particularly in Russia in Germany, and ultimately throughout the world, to become a work described by Marx friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels as the Bible of the working class.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
13. Nickel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America
Author: by Barbara Ehrenreich
Published at: Picador USA; 1st edition (August 1, 2011)
ISBN: 978-0312626686
In this now classic work, Barbara Ehrenreich, our sharpest and most original social critic, goes “undercover” as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them.
She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a jobany jobcan be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered.
Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly “unskilled,” that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort.
15. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Author: by Naomi Klein
Published at: Picador; 1st edition (June 24, 2008)
ISBN: 978-0312427993
In this groundbreaking alternative history of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman’s free-market economic revolution, Naomi Klein challenges the popular myth of this movement’s peaceful global victory. From Chile in 1973 to Iraq today, Klein shows how Friedman and his followers have repeatedly harnessed terrible shocks and violence to implement their radical policies.
As John Gray wrote in The Guardian, “There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books.”
16. JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity
Author: by Lawrence Kudlow
Published at: Portfolio; Illustrated edition (September 6, 2016)
ISBN: 978-1595231147
The fascinating, suppressed history of how JFK pioneered supply-side economics.John F. Kennedy was the first president since the 1920s to slash tax rates across-the-board, becoming one of the earliest supply-siders. Sadly, today’s Democrats have ignored JFK’s tax-cut legacy and have opted instead for an anti-growth, tax-hiking redistribution program, undermining America’s economy.
One person who followed JFK’s tax-cut growth model was Ronald Reagan. This is the never-before-told story of the link between JFK and Ronald Reagan. This is the secret history of American prosperity. JFK realized that high taxes that punished success and fanned class warfare harmed the economy.
In the 1950s, when high tax rates prevailed, America endured recessions every two or three years and the ranks of the unemployed swelled. Only in the 1960s did an uninterrupted boom at a high rate of growth (averaging 5 percent per year) drive a tremendous increase in jobs for the long term.
The difference was Kennedy’s economic policy, particularly his push for sweeping tax-rate cuts. Kennedy was so successful in the ’60s that he directly inspired Ronald Reagan’s tax cut revolution in the 1980s, which rejuvenated the economy and gave us another boom that lasted for two decades.
