Reference

Reading List

A short, deliberately unbalanced list. It includes the foundational works whose arguments are still being had, several accessible modern introductions, and a handful of books about statistics and the reporting of numbers, which turn out to be as useful for reading economic news as any economics text. Books are grouped by what they are for rather than by the position they take, and the list is chosen to include serious writers who disagree with each other.

The foundations

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The origin of the discipline and much more readable than its reputation suggests. The famous passages on the division of labour and on self-interest are worth reading in context, where they sit alongside sharp observations about the tendency of businessmen to conspire against the public and about the limits of markets in providing what he called public works.

Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). Where comparative advantage is first set out properly. Difficult prose, enormously influential argument; the chapter on foreign trade is the one still taught two centuries later.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). The book that created macroeconomics as a separate field. Famously hard going, and worth attempting at least in part because so much subsequent argument is a response to it.

Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and The Road to Serfdom (1944). The two most influential twentieth-century statements of the case for economic liberty, written from different traditions and arriving at overlapping conclusions by quite different routes. Both are short.

Governing the Commons (1990). A study of how communities manage shared resources without either private ownership or state control, based on field evidence from around the world. It complicates the standard textbook dichotomy in a way that has held up well, and it won its author a Nobel prize.

Modern introductions

The Worldly Philosophers (1953). A narrative history of economic thought through the lives of its major figures. Still the best single entry point for a general reader, and the book most likely to make someone want to read the originals.

Development as Freedom (1999). An argument that development should be measured by the expansion of what people are actually able to do rather than by income alone. Clear, humane, and a good corrective to any reading list that treats output as the only variable of interest.

The Undercover Economist (2005). Everyday phenomena — coffee pricing, supermarket layout, traffic — explained through scarcity, information and market power. An unusually painless introduction to microeconomic reasoning.

Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). Not an economics book, but the standard general account of the cognitive research that behavioural economics is built on, by one of the psychologists who did the work.

Numbers, statistics and reporting

How to Lie with Statistics (1954). Seventy years old, under two hundred pages, and still the fastest inoculation available against the misreadings catalogued in our report on recurring statistical errors. Almost every trick it describes appeared in print this month somewhere.

The Signal and the Noise (2012). On forecasting: which predictions work, which do not, and why the difference is usually about how uncertainty is handled rather than how much data is available.

Naked Statistics (2013). A clear non-technical treatment of sampling, inference and correlation, aimed at readers who want to understand studies rather than perform them.

The Tyranny of Metrics (2018). On what happens when a measure becomes a target. Directly relevant to reading any story built around a performance statistic.

Economic history

Lords of Finance (2009). The central bankers of the interwar years and the decisions that shaped the Great Depression. Narrative history that teaches monetary policy almost incidentally.

This Time Is Different (2009). Eight centuries of financial crises assembled into a comparative dataset. The value is in the pattern: crises rhyme, and the reasoning that precedes them rhymes too.

A note on this list

These are suggestions, not endorsements of every argument in them, and several of the authors would disagree strenuously with one another — which is rather the point. Nothing here is sold or linked to a retailer, and this site has no commercial relationship with any publisher or author. Most of these titles are available through any public library, and several of the older works are out of copyright and free to read at Project Gutenberg. For shorter reference material, see the data sources page.