The fine folk over at Planet Money’s The Indicator (an excellent podcast) recently spent five episodes discussing five of their favourite fun-to-read economics and business books. It’s a good list, in my humble opinion, and not just because it includes… (drum roll)
Fifty Inventions That Made the Modern Economy, which is emerging in paperback in the US as I type. The fun of this book has been to weave together economic ideas such as winner-take-all effects with the more human side of everything – surprising stories, inspiring (or villainous) people, and generous slices of history. (Or, as my publishers put it, “Who thought up paper money? What was the secret element that made the Gutenberg printing press possible? And what is the connection between The Da Vinci Code and the collapse of Lehman Brothers?”)
Lots more about the book here – the New York Times talked about my “prodigious skills as a storyteller” (shucks) and there are plenty of other cheering reviews too.
But what of the other four? One I have not read and cannot vouch for, but three books that I admire more than somewhat:
Diane Coyle’s GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History (US) (UK) – Diane writes elegantly and really understands the topic deeply. This is a thoughtful exploration of the historical strengths and the emerging weaknesses of an important measure of our economy. A lot of books about GDP seem to begin with the assumption that it’s transparently an absurd measure; I learned more from Prof Coyle’s more balanced analysis.
Linda Yueh’s What Would The Great Economists Do? (US) (UK) delivers lovely potted biographies of some of the greats (Smith, Marx, Keynes, Robinson, Fisher and others) and asks what they would think about contemporary economic problems – for instance, Joan Robinson on wage stagnation. The biographies are uniformly fascinating; the contemporary analysis seems (to me) more interesting as the economists get more recent. Fisher and Robinson had a lot to say about problems today; Smith and Marx not so much, at least not in this book. Still: recommended!
Then there is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. No, I don’t understand why everyone thinks this is somehow a business book. It’s a thing of beauty, though. (US) (UK)