Here are 100 books that Inventing the Future fans have personally recommended if you like
Inventing the Future.
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Most of us want to live good lives—lives based on connection, lives based on friendship, lives based on others recognizing who we are. But we often ignore the places and spaces in our society—facilities we call social infrastructure—that can build those ties. We cut funding to libraries, allow private developers to cut down shared green spaces, and neglect our local restaurants, cafes, and bars. To build healthy and happy societies, we need to be able to connect beyond our own nationality, religion, ethnicity, and beliefs. These spaces help us do just that.
I love this book because Rebecca Solnit dissolves the disaster movie myth that panic and chaos take over when catastrophe strikes.
Instead, she shows something I have found again in my own fieldwork: shocks often bring out extraordinary calm, generosity, and solidarity, and the very disruption that Hollywood turns into looting and stampedes actually builds social connections rather than severing them.
That is where the book's title comes from, and it captures something I have spent my career trying to prove with data. Solnit proved it with stories, and reading it felt like meeting a kindred spirit who arrived at the same truth from a completely different direction.
"The freshest, deepest, most optimistic account of human nature I've come across in years." -Bill McKibben
The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
A dozen years ago or so, I started teaching climate change instead of consumer culture. That’s because the very same Marxist critique of capitalism helped explain both the problems of unsustainable consumption and climate catastrophe. I did this work for my students, and I did it for me – and it "woke me from my dogmatic slumber," a term Kant used when he was shocked out of complacency by Hume. Because once I really understood the seriousness of climate change, I realized that nothing about the way we live – and think – will remain the same as before. So I addressed it in a 2019 book and in the new one.
I learned things in this book that I didn’t know, for example, about the history of the UBI, and I respect the politics overall.
It has an admirably accessible tone, and the message that we should aim for utopia is so very needed today. It helped me realize that we must all think about life after the end of work.
Universal basic income. A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe's leading young thinkers shows how we can build an ideal world today.
"A more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell." -- New York Times
After working all day at jobs we often dislike, we buy things we don't need. Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, reminds us it needn't be this way -- and in some places it isn't. Rutger Bregman's TED Talk about universal basic income seemed impossibly radical when he delivered it in 2014. A quarter of a million views later, the…
A dozen years ago or so, I started teaching climate change instead of consumer culture. That’s because the very same Marxist critique of capitalism helped explain both the problems of unsustainable consumption and climate catastrophe. I did this work for my students, and I did it for me – and it "woke me from my dogmatic slumber," a term Kant used when he was shocked out of complacency by Hume. Because once I really understood the seriousness of climate change, I realized that nothing about the way we live – and think – will remain the same as before. So I addressed it in a 2019 book and in the new one.
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest?
In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel…
Katie's Gamble is an unexpected, unique story about a young woman who's trying to support her younger siblings by keeping her family's confectionery shop open.
In order to do that, she has to take on her older brother, who's a notorious gambler in Louisiana. Additionally, she has to outsmart Rowdy…
A dozen years ago or so, I started teaching climate change instead of consumer culture. That’s because the very same Marxist critique of capitalism helped explain both the problems of unsustainable consumption and climate catastrophe. I did this work for my students, and I did it for me – and it "woke me from my dogmatic slumber," a term Kant used when he was shocked out of complacency by Hume. Because once I really understood the seriousness of climate change, I realized that nothing about the way we live – and think – will remain the same as before. So I addressed it in a 2019 book and in the new one.
I enjoyed how punchy it is, how short the sections are, and how accessible it is. I also like that we get occasional glimpses into the author’s own life as a Marxist, and appreciate the analytical smarts that went into it.
The last ten years have seen a dramatic upsurge of interest in socialist theory and politics. As a recent Washington Post op-ed put it, "We are living in a new social democratic moment". People are increasingly drawn to Marxist theory but find it difficult to imagine how it can be integrated practically into an everyday life pervaded by capitalist norms and social practices. Often intuitively, they agree with Marx's critique of capitalism, but don't know how to bridge the gap between their sense of dissatisfaction with the present and a revolutionary solution which can feel indefinitely postponed and remote. Living…
I came to activism at a young age, inspired by a book given to me by a friend in Grade 10. I also grew up poor; my trajectory into university was unusual for my demographic, a fact I only discovered once I was doing my PhD in the sociology of education. By the time I started interviewing activists for my doctorate, I had a burning desire to understand how social change could happen, what democracy really looked like, and who was left out of participating. I am still trying to figure these things out. If you are, too, the books on this list might help!
I’ve loved Wendy Brown’s work since I started reading it while I was doing my PhD back in 2003. I cite her stuff in almost everything I’ve written. This recent book pulls together her vast expertise and insights about political theory, inequality, and democratic practices to explain how neoliberalism has always been anti-democratic, and how it continues to prop up authoritarian styles of leadership, like that of Donald Trump in the US. Key to this, she argues, is how neoliberalism has always made an appeal to ‘tradition,’ which smuggles in patriarchal, classist, and heterosexist notions of the nuclear family, the supremacy of Christian ideals, and a sort of rugged individualism that denies the necessity of a welfare state.
Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring?
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism's multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works…
I'm a Professor in Geography at Trinity College Dublin and a Senior Research Associate in the School of Tourism and Hospitality at the University of Johannesburg. My research and teaching focus on the political economy of globalisation in Africa, and I'm interested in the ways in which current, massive global changes are impacting Africa and the prospects for its development based on constructed or available policy space. Sometimes there seems to be so much change in the world that it is hard to pick out what the most important trends are and their inter-relationships. I picked this book list based on what I see as some of the biggest changes in the world right now.
I loved this book because it explains how to understand our current politics, particularly in the United States and Europe.
Far-right parties have gained ground globally and have often come to power. Sometimes the political changes and events happen so quickly that they are bewildering, but there is a logic to them that has roots back to the rise of the ideology of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The book traces this lineage and shows how the rise of the populist right reflects a fracture within this global movement, which now brings together libertarians, market liberals, racists, and nationalists in a new fusion. It reads easily and compellingly and helped me make sense of the current moment.
A revelatory exploration of how today's right-wing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within it
Bracingly original... Hayek's Bastards demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them... His book offers an illuminating history to our current bewildering moment, as right-wing populists join forces with billionaire oligarchs to take a chain saw to the foundations of public life, until there's nothing left to stand on' - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in…
Papyrologist Lisa Emmer's world flips when the Sûreté detains her at her Metro station with news of the savage murder of the esteemed Paris historian Dr. Raimond Foix, her friend and mentor in the study of ancient documents.
Horrified, Lisa finds clues at the crime scene left behind for her…
Since the age of seven, I've been conscious of the need to bypass how one is supposed to do things. I realized then that my grandmother could not pursue a writing career because she was also a woman and a wife; a cautionary tale I took to heart since I was already beginning to identify as an artist. I'm driven to uncover how we recognize what we see, and how forces beyond our control engender or foreclose upon new ways of being in the world. A professional life lived in the arts has allowed the fullest flexibility for exploring these ideas as one is generally encouraged to think differently.
This pocket-sized book of a mere 63 pages can be read in a couple of hours and has a lasting impact.
Fraser, a feminist philosopher I was lucky to take a class with once in graduate school, explains the political and economic conditions that frame the near-constant anxiety one feels daily as witnesses to near-constant national and global crises.
We are all living through a “hegemonic gap;” that is, a profoundly unsettling transformation between the failure of agreed upon political authorities (she labels this progressive neoliberalism) and the lack of any clear future direction. In the mix is the global rise of proto-fascist populism, environmental disaster, increasing wealth gaps, and violence and war.
What can guide us out of this mess? That is the subject of the last few pages…
Across the globe politics as usual are being rejected and faith in neoliberalism is fracturing beyond repair. Leading political theorist Nancy Fraser, in conversation with Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara, dissects neoliberalism's current crisis and argues that we might wrest new futures from its ruins.
The global political, ecological, economic, and social breakdown-symbolized, but not caused, by Trump's election-has destroyed faith that neoliberal capitalism is beneficial to the majority. Fraser explores how this faith was built through the late twentieth century by balancing two central tenets: recognition (who deserves rights) and distribution (who deserves income). When these began to fray, new…
I’ve been trying to understand people’s politics since I was a kid and wondered why my dad, who had been a boy in Sicily under Mussolini, spoke so fondly of “il Duce”—even though Dad was an otherwise independent thinker who believed in people’s inherent dignity, not to mention a man who was an immigrant and an outsider and thus exactly the kind of person fascists hate. I think this background partially explains why I focus my writing on interpreting the significance and appeal of widespread and, in some cases, morally indefensible and contradictory cultural-political ideologies such as neoliberalism and racism.
Folks familiar with the term “neoliberalism” usually describe it as the economic system that tries to unleash the market by getting the government out of the way. I like Globalists because it shows how unleashing the market demands that government gets in the way—of workers’ rights, movements for equality, and, most ominously, democracy itself. Since it’s impossible to understand fascism without tackling capitalism, a book explaining how we got to today’s market principles is vital.
I see this book as a history of the neoliberal economists who encouraged political leaders to use state violence and repression to unleash free trade and shape the global economy. Globalists tell the story of how modern capitalism developed into today’s vast landscape of inequality that makes a fertile ground for fascism and violent extremism to develop.
George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year
"A groundbreaking contribution...Intellectual history at its best." -Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again…
I am Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Munich. I also taught as a visitor at Duke University, Harvard, University of North Carolina, as well as the University of Vienna, the Vienna School of Economics, and the University of St. Gallen. Since the financial crisis of 2008, I have been writing about current economic issues and the need for new paradigms in economics. I have been advocating a humanistic approach to economics in which people and their quality of life count more than the output of the economy. I have also formulated the need for capitalism with a human face. I have also blogged for PBS.
I think that this book is an excellent introduction to the history of the past four decades as it shows why we ended up with a billionaire authoritarian as the leader of the nation.
It begins with Reaganomics and argues that twelve years of Republican Administration generated sufficient momentum for its pro-market ideology that Democrat Bill Clinton was reluctant to reverse course. He went all in on globalization and continued to deregulate the financial sector that ultimately steered the economy into the financial crisis of 2008. Obama failed to seize the opportunity to end the dominance of the financial oligarchy and maintained the power structure as he found it.
The election of 2016 showed the revolt of the “deplorables” keen on draining the swamp in Washington responsible for their fate.
Best Books of 2022: Financial Times Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022: De Tijd Shortlisted for Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year
The most sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left.
The epochal shift toward neoliberalism-a web of related policies that, broadly speaking, reduced the footprint of government in society and reassigned economic power to private market forces-that began in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1970s fundamentally changed the world.…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Neoliberalism and I have grown up in opposition to one another over the past four decades. As a professor of economics, union, and political activist I have observed, wrote about, and resisted its effects on the life chances of the great majority of its citizens with particular focus on the United States as its primary protagonist and gatekeeper. The opposition to this transformative epoch included writing about the significant contributions of my profession to Neoliberal economics in two previous books; The Profit Doctrine: The Economists of the Neoliberal Era and Economics in the 21st Century: A Critical Perspective.
In addition to its excellent coverage of the economics of this transformation, its historical account of the shift in class partnerships makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the period. In the Golden Age of the previous period Big Business maintained a fraught alliance with its unions willing to pay growing wages closely aligned with labor productivity growth with the grudging acceptance of higher taxes and regulations of the Keynesian era leaving small business to fend for itself. Once Japan and Germany reindustrialized creating a more competitive economic landscape Kotz describes the full-blown class warfare identified by Buffet as Big Business realigned with small business to fight for cuts to its wages, taxes, regulatory costs and unions, and progressive politics.
The financial and economic collapse that began in the United States in 2008 and spread to the rest of the world continues to burden the global economy. David Kotz, who was one of the few academic economists to predict it, argues that the ongoing economic crisis is not simply the aftermath of financial panic and an unusually severe recession but instead is a structural crisis of neoliberal, or free-market, capitalism. Consequently, continuing stagnation cannot be resolved by policy measures alone. It requires major institutional restructuring.
"Kotz's book will reward careful study by everyone interested in the question of stages in…
