100 Books Like COVID-19 and Sovereign Debt

I see David Greaeber’s book as a landmark in the field. He completely changed my understanding of and views on money’s role in society and its evolution. I had the good fortune to meet David a few times (in fact, I made a podcast with him) and feel like I learned from every conversation.

Until I read David’s book, I had assumed that the Barter theory of money and the double coincidence of wants was the natural and unchallenged explanation for how money came to be and what roles it performed. David’s and subsequent authors' work has shown that this view is simplistic and outdated. 

Most debts embody a legal contract specifying how and when the borrowed funds will be repaid and any circumstances in which the obligation can be amended.

Non-payment of most loan contracts end up before a judge whose decisions on repayment are guided by a national bankruptcy law. Debts of sovereign states differ.

Insolvent governments negotiate partial or delayed repayment with their various creditors. The starting point is always that the contracts must be honored.

Professor Lienau argues that there are instances in legal theory and historically in practice in which governments did not and should not have had to repay “illegitimate” debts. She calls for international recognition of a legally enforceable concept of “responsible” lending and borrowing.

Imagine how that might make creditors think twice about lending to oppressive regimes?

When people talk about human rights and sovereign debt, it is usually when the government cannot pay its obligations and squeezes its citizens in the effort.

Who will speak up to protect those people? Thirty authors (including your correspondent) aim to do just that.

While one essay claims that creditor (property) rights trump human rights in international law, most of the authors discuss how to bring human rights into the legal landscape governing different types of foreign loans or investment, or how to protect the rights to food, health, education and more when the International Monetary Fund and creditors demand austerity.

Other essays propose international legal reforms (including arbitral, soft law, and “anti-vulture” litigation). Scholars, activists, or just the curious will want to consult this important and thoroughly accessible volume.

Government borrowing is the golden goose that makes possible investment in public infrastructure and continuing expenditures despite temporary shortfalls in tax revenue.

But when not managed well or when rocked by unforeseen catastrophes, sovereign debt can become an impossible burden.

Because the International Monetary Fund is mandated to worry about international financial stability, it is the central institution for international oversight of sovereign debt.

In this volume, the IMF brought together 38 economic and legal experts to explain to a broad audience why governments borrow, how to borrow sustainably, and how to emerge from default.

It is not a training manual but is comprehensive and clearly written so that even ministers of finance and legislators should understand it and civil society should draw on it in campaigns against debt crises.

I love this one because of the premise: Theroux wants to go up the west coast of Africa, with the caveat that he will go via overland methods only – no planes.

The thinking is that having to traverse the land (or water) itself, however circuitous, tedious, or even dangerous the journey may be, gives us a much greater appreciation for the places we visit. It gives our experiences texture and forces us to be in the present.

I think this is a critical message for us in the modern world. We have this idea that convenience and comfort and speed are necessarily aspirational. But if everything’s streamlined, we end up taking things for granted and essentially just ghosting through life.

I love this book because of the compelling answer it gives to one of the most fundamental questions: why are some nations rich and others poor? The answer is that it depends on the political and economic institutions in place, with wealth accruing to nations with “inclusive institutions.” Put simply, nations with intellectual and economic freedom are richer.

Why does freedom matter? Because freedom opens the stage to Schumpeter’s creative destruction! The authors prove this, remarkably, through examples from around the globe, and they even use examples thousands of years apart in history. This is a must read to understand the way in which creative destruction drives prosperity both today and historically.

This book helped me see how much damage is done when treating the world as simple.

Escobar never mentions complexity theory, but that's precisely what animates his critique—a sense that development thinking flattens difference, reduces context, and imposes order where none exists. I'd long been uneasy with how the West 'solves' problems it helped create. This book gave me the conceptual tools to see why: it exposed development as a discourse that makes the world legible in Western terms, only to intervene on that basis.

What I love about this book is its refusal to accept those terms. It shows how we get the world wrong by insisting it should resemble us in the West, and why the costs of that are always borne elsewhere.

This book is like the other side of the coin to Sex and World Peace.

In that book, the authors articulate the connection between gender inequality and global suffering through statistics, whereas Half the Sky describes it in individual stories. It is moving to hear about these women’s suffering, but it is also uplifting to hear how they have overcome.

This book is an excellent resource for understanding how gender equality leads to increasing economic growth while reducing global poverty and inequality. It is an important tool in any ordinary hero’s toolkit.

Seek finds Johnson mining his own humanity through true tales of Alaskan gold prospecting and the manhunt for a serial bomber.

He loses himself in fungus at an Oregan hippie festival and searches for God at a Christian biker rally in Texas. His travels take him to the sometimes-literal frontlines of the news, including the hellish delirium of the Liberian civil war and conversations with Constitution-toting Montanans bent on the overthrow of the United States government.

Johnson's writing in this compilation of essays was absolutely searing and a revelation to me. This stuff belongs in the home library of anyone who's ever aspired to pick up the pen.

Yes, this is the same Graham Hancock who now writes contrarian archeological tomes. I conducted some of my PhD fieldwork in the same area of Somalia that he visited as a reporter, and I was there not long after he was in the 1980s.

This was the first book I came across that explained why almost every development project I’d encountered when traveling around Africa seemed to be such a waste, or worse. Next to no one at the time was reporting on the corruption generated by ‘development’ or the extent to which aid was an industry. Hancock nailed it.