The
Library

Start here. The best account of how rich countries actually got rich — and it wasn't by following the rules they now tell everyone else to follow. Not vibes. Institutions.

Know your adversary. How a small group of right-wing activists dismantled the economic consensus we're now trying to rebuild. It worked. Now we're undoing it.

The WWII mobilization story, told by a right-wing historian. Which makes it more useful, not less. Our playbook, wrapped in a flag.

Same story, less mythology. Business leaders and government servants working together, with industrialists in public coordinator roles. Messy, effective, instructive.

The book that proves this is all actually possible. “We can afford what we can do.” Read this when someone tells you we can’t afford it.

Every piece of technology in your pocket was funded by the U.S. government decades before any private investor saw a use for it. The biggest venture capitalist in history takes no stake. It’s a racket.

A whole new economics paradigm. Not just what’s wrong with the current one — an actual replacement. It was on every desk at a think tank in Berlin. Make of that what you will.

Same story as Bad Samaritans but just about America, in language your centrist uncle might read. The government has always shaped the market. It stopped doing it well in the 1980s.

Finland and Denmark mobilized not because they were at war — just because they decided to. Turns out you don’t need a catastrophe to act like one is coming.

The free market myth, dismantled. The “invisible hand” has always had someone guiding it. Hughes tells the stories of who did it well and who blew it.

Bill Gates’ favorite book — useful for certain conversations. A country the size of America cannot make a prosperous living without manufacturing. Nations that “let the market decide” end up at the bottom.

The whole story. Four ages of American capitalism from colonial era to now. Levy argues we’re at a turning point. He’s right.

Who are the real makers? Workers, entrepreneurs, caregivers. Who are the takers? Wall Street, using government-backed credit to extract wealth while contributing nothing. Foroohar names names.

2008 broke the economy. It also broke economics as a discipline. Mazzucato and Jacobs bring together economists to rebuild the theory from scratch. Theory and policy, both.

Back to Chang. The toolkit — how to understand economic arguments and spot the bad ones. Don’t get played by men in suits.

What the world economy looks like from Beijing. The measures taken after 2008 were insufficient. Bold, counter-cyclical government investment is what’s needed. He’s not wrong.

Still not convinced? The former governor of the Bank of England thinks the system is broken too. Read it.

The Financial Times economics guru admits austerity was wrong. When the mainstream admits it, you know things have shifted.

Former PIMCO CEO says the same thing. Governments must intervene beyond central bank activity. The improbable keeps becoming reality.

South Korea in the 1960s: no economy, mostly illiterate population, almost no resources. Built a modern wealthy economy in a single generation. Samsung started as a fruit importer.

The Japanese miracle wasn’t capitalism unleashed. It was decades of sustained government intervention. The miracle was engineered. On purpose.

The really big picture. Colonialism, extraction, and the mechanics of how economic power shifts. Dark, important, clarifying.