Recommended Reading for Economists

Mr R Stevenson – Head of Economic Studies

Below is an up-to-date reading list (courtesy of the tutor2u website) for economists, particularly those who are considering studying the subject at university. Wider reading and offering your thoughts on a particular book / topic will form a key part of any personal statement.

For anyone in Year 11 (or below!) considering taking the subject at A-Level, we would recommend Kate Raworth’s book “Doughnut Economics”. RAS

Editor’s Note: For more information about any of these books, please speak to a member of the Economics Department. If you would like to write a book review for The GSAL Journal, please write your review and submit it to Mr Dodd via email – or get in touch here. CPD

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1. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (Ha-Joon Chang) – challenges conventional thinking

2. Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance: (Ian Goldin & Chris Kutarna)

3. Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built (Duncan Clark) – The rise of the Chinese corporate giant

4. Almighty Dollar (Dharshini David) – follows the journey of a single $ to show how the global economy works

5. Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy (Haskel and Westlake)

6. Capitalism: 50 Ideas You Really Need to Know (Jonathan Portes) – compact and excellent reference material

7. Choice Factory (Richard Shotton) – a story of 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy

8. Doughnut Economics (Kate Raworth) – challenges much of orthodox thinking in the subject

9. Drunkard’s Walk (Leonard Mlodinow) – a brilliant history of Maths with lots of relevant applications

10. Economics for the Common Good (Jean Tirole) – applied micro from a recent Nobel prize winner

11. GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Professor Diane Coyle) – really good on the GDP / well-being debate

12. Grave New World: (Stephen King) – Former head of Econ at HSBC looks at the fracturing global economy

13. Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today (Linda Yueh) – perspectives on contemporary issues

14. Growth Delusion: The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations (David Pilling) – antidote to gospel of GDP

15. Inequality (Anthony Atkinson) – a superb book on one of the defining economic/political issues of the age

16. Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us (Sharman and Fishman)

17. Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and the Market (Paul De Grauwe)

18. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics (Richard Thaler) – a truly superb biography

19. Plundered Planet: How to Reconcile Prosperity with Nature: (Professor Paul Collier) – development classic

20. Poor Economics: Rethinking Ways to Fight Global Poverty (Banerjee & Duflo) – development economics

21. Positive Linking – Networks and Nudges (Paul Ormerod) – good introduction to network economics

22. Rise and Fall of Nations: Ten Rules of Change in the Post-Crisis World (Richir Sharma)

23. Risk Savvy – How to make good decisions (Gerd Gigerenzer) – the world of heuristics and risk management

24. Ten Great Economists (Philip Thornton) – biographical background, well worth a read

25. The Box – How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, (Levinson)

26. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Brad Stone) – a great business page turner

27. The Great Divide (Professor Joseph Stiglitz) – one of the classic critiques of globalisation

28. The Great Escape (Professor Angus Deaton) – a broad sweep of economic history and poverty reduction

29. The Undoing Project: (Michael Lewis) – Tracks the birth of behavioural economics, Kahneman and Tversky

30. Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow: (Professor Daniel Kahneman) – the classic Kahneman epic on psychology

31. Upstarts: How Uber and Airbnb are changing the world (Brad Stone) Follow up to his work on Amazon

32. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (Michael Sandel) – Pure PPE bliss

33. Who Gets What – And Why: Understand the Choices You Have; Improve the Choices You Make (Al Roth)

34. Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (Cesar Hidalgo) – challenging

35. World of Three Zeroes (Muhammad Yunus) – new book from founder of the Grameen Bank