Recently my friend Richard Green posted a short reading list of ten books he recommends, which you can find on LinkedIn, but for those without an account, I reproduce here:
"Ten favorite books in economics, lest you are looking for gift ideas:
- Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace
- Manski, Identification Problems in the Social Sciences
- Deaton and Muellbauer, Economics and Consumer Behavior
- Goldberger, A Course in Econometrics
- Maddala, Limited Dependent and Qualitative Variables in Economics
- Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs
- Krugman, Geography and Trade
- Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
- Friedman and Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960
- Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
I heartily endorse each of Richard’s choices, and colleagues have made additional recommendations in LinkedIn comments:
- De Soto, The Mystery of Capital (I much prefer his earlier book The Other Path, more on that another time)
- Hirschmann, Exit, Voice and Loyalty
- Bannerji and Duflo, Poor Economics
- Krugman, The New Geography of Jobs
- Dixit and Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically
I thought I’d suggest a few additions to the list, a dozen or so of my favorites. My list includes economics but wanders further afield. Without further ado:
Abramitzky, Ran, and Leah Boustan. Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success. Hachette UK, 2022. A very readable summary of their impressive empirical research on the outcomes of two major waves of U.S. immigration: our recent increase, and the wave around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Prepare to be surprised!
Bertaud, Alain. Order without Design. MIT Press, 2018. An acclaimed planner-architect-urbanist Alain Bertaud distills lessons from more than half a century of practical and analytical work in dozens of cities ranging from New York and Paris, to Sana’a and Port-au-Prince. Transport, land and housing, labor markets, urban form, and the proper role of urban planning are all covered concisely, yet in amazing depth
Deaton, Angus. The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. Princeton University Press, 2013. The long progress of economic and social development deserves its own list – and a long one at that – but if you ask me where to start, I will go with this excellent and highly readable introduction. I like his focus on scientific progress, and health systems, especially public health. Public health underpins development and more, and has long been under-resourced in the United States, and frankly is under threat both here and abroad:
Glaeser, Edward L. Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. Penguin, 2011. If you wonder why cities exist, and why it is that how well we organize and run them is a major factor in a society’s success or failure, Ed’s book is a great place to start. A few quibbles on the density of Chinese cities aside, a great introduction.
Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War. Princeton University Press, 2016. A great economic history. As an economist who’s spent the majority of my time researching housing markets, I particularly recommend Chapter 4: how the revolution in housing size and quality a century ago, interleaved with electrification and advances like refrigeration and the washing machine, was more important than the iPhone. Yes, really.
Think the DOGE approach is a great idea? Read Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service. Riverhead Books, 2025. Along broadly similar lines, I also recommend his The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy. (2018), and The Premonition: A Pandemic Story. (2021).
Everyone needs to read them some George Orwell. For the past decade, many of us have been bouncing back between Orwell’s 1984 as a guide to our next decade or so, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Between a totalitarian future characterized by state violence and torture, surveillance, propaganda and control of language (“Newspeak”) and a world where individuals’ futures are determined genetically, and where conformity is (mostly) ensured by hypnopaedic learning, and pacifying citizens with entertainment, sex, and the drug soma. Sticks or carrots? And to what end? I think we need to ponder both Orwell and Huxley, but the recent news is definitely trending stick.
Neil Postman famously summarized the contrast: “Orwell feared those who would ban books. Huxley feared there would be no reason to ban a book, for no one would want to read one.” For the record, technology skeptic Postman worried more about Huxley’s possible future.
Can’t get too much Orwell. Animal Farm, of course, his essay on “Politics and the English Language,” and The Road to Wigan Pier (read the first half, describing the life of British coal miners in the era when my forbearers were mining coal in Pennsylvania; the second half confirms he wrote this in 1937 when he was still trying to figure out his own politics.)
Putnam, Robert D. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Simon and Schuster, 2016. We spend a lot of money on old people like myself (albeit not always as effectively as we should!), we need to focus on our children. If you like to read journal articles (and who doesn’t!), James Heckman is another great resource.
Ritchie, Hannah. Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. Random House, 2024. There are dozens of books I could recommend on environmental issues, but Ritchie’s recent effort is a very readable summary that, in my view, strikes a good balance between concern for very serious problems and realism about our next steps.
Rosling, Hans, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. St Martin's Press, 2018. For years I’ve been creating charts of country GDP and life expectancy and the like (to say nothing of urbanization, house prices….) But around 2007, when I found my first YouTube video by Hans Rosling, I think it was “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen,” I had the same feeling most rock guitarists had the first time they heard Jimi Hendrix.
Rosling’s videos are great, but shortly after he passed away Factfulness, a collaboration with his son and daughter-in-law, was published. BTW, aforementioned Hannah Ritchie is one of many who cite Rosling as an inspiration in their own work.
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny Graphic Edition: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Ten Speed Graphic, 2021. Timothy Snyder is one of the leading English-speaking historians of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust (though he reads and speaks an impressive number of the regional languages). I first encountered Snyder’s work when I was preparing teaching notes on Ukraine after the second Russian invasion in 2022. He posted his lectures on The Making of Modern Ukraine on YouTube, and I found them deep and invaluable.
I was then drawn to his polemic On Tyranny, which he first published in 2017. The 2021 edition I listed above adds drawings by Nora Krug, if you have a taste for graphics. If you prefer 20 bite-sized but thought-provoking commentaries, see the YouTube version.
Finally, let’s go the source code of our Republic. I read the U.S. Constitution every few years; I had occasion to read it again during a flight to a conference a few months ago. It’s not a long read, it’s a little painful in parts (the 3/5 compromise is still in there, though obviated by the 13th and 14th Amendments; and the rules for elections are still a dog’s breakfast) but it’s still a finely wrought document for the most part, and one I’d like to discuss further with some current officials.
You can take your Constitution “neat,” but there are editions available with helpful commentaries. I use Richard Beeman’s The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution: A Fully Annotated Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and Amendments, and Selections from the Federalist Papers. Penguin Books, 2010. For a deeper dive, the Library of America has published a two-volume set on The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification (1993).
