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Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism by Glory Liu (Princeton University Press, 2022) Adam Smith was born 300 years ago this year. Since [...]

Post Growth: Life after Capitalism by Tim Jackson (Polity, 2021) Many excellent books describe the nightmare facing us as we rapidly approach the limits of planet Earth's capacity to sustain [...]

Capital in the Twenty-First Century took the world by storm when the English version of the book was published in April 2014. With many tables and figures, as well as [...]

The main lessons from November's presidential election concern income inequality. Inequality in the United States has been rising for decades. Economist Thomas Piketty calculates that between 1980 and today the [...]

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Norton, 2019) For those who have read Joseph Stiglitz's previous work, especially Globalization and [...]

The Triumph of Injustice, by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019) Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have collaborated with Thomas Piketty and were the brain trust [...]

The Elephant in the Room Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World, by Branko Milanovic (Harvard University Press, 2019) Branko Milanovic, former head of research at [...]

Franz Mehring published the first biography of Karl Marx in 1918, at the centenary of Marx's birth. David McLellan's 1973 Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, regarded by many as [...]

Steve Keen, professor of economics at Kingston University in the U.K. and hailed by Richtopia as the 18th most influential living economist, has written a very brief volume on the [...]

Hired by James Bloodworth (Atlantic Books, 2018) Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler (Semiotext(e), 2018) Last February, Amazon reversed a prior decision to establish its new headquarters in Long Island City [...]

Give People Money: How A Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, And Remake The World, by Annie Lowrey (Crown, 2018).Universal basic income (UBI) is a hot topic. Labor [...]

Signs of the debt crisis facing a growing number of U.S. households are not hard to find. The subprime lending debacle, with its mushrooming rates of mortgage default and foreclosure, [...]

Last May, HUD Secretary Ben Carson claimed that poverty stems from a wrong mindset. He asserted that people with the right mindset in poor neighborhoods will escape poverty; those possessing [...]

Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank (MacMillan, 2016) In his new book Listen, Liberal, journalist and historian Thomas Frank berates the Democratic [...]

Social Security Works! Why Social Security Isn't Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All by Nancy J. Altman and Eric R. Kingston, with a Foreword by David [...]

Other People's Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business by Jennifer Taub. Yale University Press, 2014. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Other People's Houses [...]

In a famous parable, several blind men seek knowledge about an elephant. Each touches a different part of the animal. The man touching the tail sees the elephant as a [...]

Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City by Steve Early (Beacon Press, 2017) Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals by Jonathan Matthew Smucker (AK [...]

If you want to learn about the economy, nothing beats going out in the world, talking to people, and participating in everyday life. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Lisa Servon, professor of city [...]

Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know, by James K. Galbraith (Oxford University Press, 2015). More than anything else, inequality has been the economic and social issue of the 21st century. [...]

Great works in economics address important issues head-on, adopt a broad perspective, and change our views regarding how economies work. Make no mistake about it: Thomas Piketty's Capital in the [...]

The Fight for $15: The Right Wage for a Working America by David Rolf (The New Press, 2016) Paying starvation wages is legal now because the U.S. minimum wage has [...]

Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist, by L. Randall Wray (Princeton University Press, 2016) Many people have called the financial crisis beginning in 2008 [...]

Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, by Robert Reich (Alfred Knopf, 2015) Saving Capitalism marks a major change for Robert Reich. In several previous books, he explained rising [...]

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer (Houghton Mifflin, 2015) Inequality: What Can Be Done?, by Anthony B. Atkinson (Harvard [...]

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert Putnam (Simon & Schuster, 2015) Political scientist Robert Putnam is one of the most astute observers of life in the United [...]

To Live and Die in America: Class, Power, Health and Healthcare by Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson (London: Pluto Press, 2013). As is well known, the United States spends substantially [...]

Economics is called the dismal science for good reason. But economists can be Pollyannas compared to journalists. Someplace Like America documents the consequences of a 30-year war against average Americans. [...]

As the 2007 Stern Review and many other studies make clear, few issues today are more pressing than greenhouse emissions and climate change. The Northern Hemisphere just suffered its hottest [...]

Review of The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. When I began reading The Spirit Level in early 2010, large U.S. financial institutions [...]

The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business, by Christopher Leonard. Simon & Schuster, 2014. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In his 1952 book American Capitalism, John Kenneth Galbraith conjectured that [...]

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, by Naomi Klein. Simon & Schuster, 2014. Adam Smith, generally regarded as the father of economics, poses this question in A Theory of [...]

5ocial Democratic America argues that the United States can and should be more like the Nordic nations, providing a vast array of social programs that will improve economic welfare without [...]

In an old Saturday Night Live skit, Dan I Ackroyd impersonated President Jimmy Carter, who could not control double-digit inflation, and so announced a new policy.'Inflation Is Your Friend,' he [...]

Banks and bankers are not very popular these days. They made loans they knew homeowners couldn't possibly repay. Then they cut corners to repossess the homes of people unable to [...]

The title of this book harkens back a work by Tolstoy describing the economic conditions in late 19th-century Russia, and to a pamphlet by Lenin that sought to rouse the [...]

Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, by Ben Goldacre (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012). The drug thalidomide was introduced in 1957 as a cure for insomnia. [...]

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, by Joseph Stiglitz. W.W. Norton, 2012. Many of the basic facts about rising income inequality in the United States [...]

So Rich, So Poor: Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America, by Peter Edelman. The New Press, 2012 I have long admired Peter Edelman. He served as an [...]

The Fine Rrint: How Big Companies Use Plain English to Rob You Blind. By David Cay Johnston. Portfolio/Penguin, 2012. The new economic reality is that large companies systematically steal from [...]

End This Depression Now! By Paul Krugman. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Paul Krugman's wit, incisiveness, and uncanny ability to present economic ideas clearly have made him a public intellectual [...]

Review of Retirement Heist by Ellen E. Schultz. Portfolio/Penguin, 2011. People involved with the movement begun by Occupy Wall Street are rightly incensed about indefensible corporate behavior. But when a [...]

Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children's Lives and America's Future, by David Kirp. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. In a famous essay, the British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin drew [...]

Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. For those interested in the political side of political economy, little surpasses the work of [...]

Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting our Money and Failing our Kids--And What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker & Claudia Dreifus. New York: Times Books, 2010. Criticizing [...]

Aftershock: The Next Economy and American's Future, by Robert Reich. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2010. Although standing only 4-foot-10, Robert Reich has been a giant in political economy over the [...]

Broke, USA: How the Working Poor Became Big Business, by Gary Rivlin. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Gary Rivlin's illuminating but uneven book introduces us to dozens of people who make [...]

Review of The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. In a famous South Park episode we encounter the underpants gnomes, who sneak into people's [...]

Review of The Economics of Integrity, by Anna Bernasek (HarperCollins, 2010). In book publishing, as in comedy, timing is of utmost importance. John Kenneth Galbraith described his insecurities surrounding publication [...]

It Takes a Pillage focuses on our current economic crisis--who to blame and how to prevent future crises. There are many people to blame. Near the top of my list, [...]