Here are 80 books that Limitarianism fans have personally recommended if you like
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There are many big problems in the world today–racism, war, climate change, unaccountable governments, exploitative corporations, and so on. But when you scratch the surface of almost any serious problem, what you find is that the root of the problem is inequality: a minority of people are rich and powerful, while those who suffer the most are typically poor and powerless. I’m so passionate about inequality because, in my eyes, it constitutes the heart and soul of what’s wrong with our world and the key to making things better.
Margaret Thatcher famously argued that “there is no alternative;” this book is the ultimate rebuttal.
I read this for the first time as an undergrad, and it forever changed me. What’s so powerful about it is that Schweickart lays out a simple but powerful model for a fundamentally different kind of society–a democratic socialist society based on economic democracy. He then carefully demonstrates that this alternative is not only feasible but that it would work far better than capitalism in pretty well every regard.
For anyone who has been searching for a clear and coherent alternative–this book is for you.
Since first published in 2002, After Capitalism has offered students and political activists alike a coherent vision of a viable and desirable alternative to capitalism. David Schweickart calls this system Economic Democracy, a successor-system to capitalism which preserves the efficiency strengths of a market economy while extending democracy to the workplace and to the structures of investment finance. In the second edition, Schweickart recognizes that increased globalization of companies has created greater than ever interdependent economies and the debate about the desirability of entrepreneurship is escalating. The new edition includes a new preface, completely updated data, reorganized chapters, and new…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
There are many big problems in the world today–racism, war, climate change, unaccountable governments, exploitative corporations, and so on. But when you scratch the surface of almost any serious problem, what you find is that the root of the problem is inequality: a minority of people are rich and powerful, while those who suffer the most are typically poor and powerless. I’m so passionate about inequality because, in my eyes, it constitutes the heart and soul of what’s wrong with our world and the key to making things better.
In this already-classic work, Joseph Stiglitz–Nobel Prize winner and chief economist for the World Bank–describes the ways in which the market has been systematically rigged in favour of the rich and big business, leading to an explosion of inequality and the rise of the 1%.
I love how this book illustrates the ways in which inequality acts as a cancer on society, eating it apart from the inside. But Stiglitz also helped me to understand how such problems can be dealt with a realistic way.
The top 1 percent of Americans control some 40 percent of the nation's wealth. But as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains in this best-selling critique of the economic status quo, this level of inequality is not inevitable. Rather, in recent years well-heeled interests have compounded their wealth by stifling true, dynamic capitalism and making America no longer the land of opportunity that it once was. They have made America the most unequal advanced industrial country while crippling growth, distorting key policy debates, and fomenting a divided society. Stiglitz not only shows how and why America's inequality is bad for our economy…
My name is Carl Rhodes, and I am a Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Technology Sydney. Like many others, in recent years I have become increasingly concerned, sometimes angry even, about how the organization of business and the economy is creating massive economic injustice. I am convinced that the economic system that has billionaires at its apex is deeply unfair, creating hardship, pain, and even death for too many people around the world. I am also convinced that we do not have to accept this gross injustice as being inevitable.
Guido Alani’s book traces the history of rich people in the West from the Middle Ages to now. What I especially illuminating about this book was that as far back as the 14th century people were calling for rich people to be expelled from democratic societies because they held too much power.
Alfani confronts us with the reality that the rich pretend to be ‘gods among men’ as if they do not have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. But all is not lost. Alfani insists that the rich have a fragile position in society because they are always at risk of the majority turning against them.
How the rich and the super-rich throughout Western history accumulated their wealth, behaved (or misbehaved) and helped (or didn't help) their communities in times of crisis
The rich have always fascinated, sometimes in problematic ways. Medieval thinkers feared that the super-rich would act 'as gods among men'; much more recently Thomas Piketty made wealth central to discussions of inequality. In this book, Guido Alfani offers a history of the rich and super-rich in the West, examining who they were, how they accumulated their wealth and what role they played in society. Covering the last thousand years, with frequent incursions into…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
There are many big problems in the world today–racism, war, climate change, unaccountable governments, exploitative corporations, and so on. But when you scratch the surface of almost any serious problem, what you find is that the root of the problem is inequality: a minority of people are rich and powerful, while those who suffer the most are typically poor and powerless. I’m so passionate about inequality because, in my eyes, it constitutes the heart and soul of what’s wrong with our world and the key to making things better.
Thomas Piketty rose to international fame for his 2014 Capital in the Twenty-First Century. But this book is even better. At a whopping 1000 pages, it’s a magnum opus. A phenomenally interesting panoramic of inequality across human history.
With intricate detail and voluminous evidence, Piketty documents the rise and fall of inequality throughout the ages, depicting the ways in which ideologies have worked to bolster or undermine it. Anyone who reads this book will walk away with a far richer understanding of some of the core dynamics underlying human history.
A New York Times Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year
The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.
Thomas Piketty's bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left…
There are many big problems in the world today–racism, war, climate change, unaccountable governments, exploitative corporations, and so on. But when you scratch the surface of almost any serious problem, what you find is that the root of the problem is inequality: a minority of people are rich and powerful, while those who suffer the most are typically poor and powerless. I’m so passionate about inequality because, in my eyes, it constitutes the heart and soul of what’s wrong with our world and the key to making things better.
Although many people intuitively recognize that inequality is a serious problem, there is widespread doubt that anything can realistically be done about it. Saez and Zucman–perhaps the two most famous tax economists in the world–demolish this pessimism. In a clear, no-nonsense manner, they demonstrate that tax systems can easily fail but they can also be made to work.
The authors describe how rich people and corporations currently avoid tax, how tax havens function, and, most importantly of all, how an evidence-based tax system can be successfully built to prevent evasion and thereby meaningfully reduce inequality.
Even as they became fabulously wealthy, the rich have seen their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Meanwhile working-class Americans have been asked to pay more. The Triumph of Injustice is a forensic investigation into this dramatic transformation. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists who revolutionised the study of inequality, demonstrate how the super-rich pay a lower tax rate than everybody else. In crystalline prose they dissect the deliberate choices and the sins of indecision that have fuelled this trend: the gradual exemption of capital owners; the surge of a new tax-avoidance industry and, most critically, tax…
My name is Carl Rhodes, and I am a Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Technology Sydney. Like many others, in recent years I have become increasingly concerned, sometimes angry even, about how the organization of business and the economy is creating massive economic injustice. I am convinced that the economic system that has billionaires at its apex is deeply unfair, creating hardship, pain, and even death for too many people around the world. I am also convinced that we do not have to accept this gross injustice as being inevitable.
How do billionaires become so rich? One story is that it is all about hard work, initiative, and special talents. If you believe that story, then you might conclude that billionaires deserve their extreme wealth. What I found especially insightful about Chuck Collins book is that he painstakingly shows that this story is bogus.
Collins delves into the realities of what he calls the ‘agents of inequality’–the accountants and lawyers who ensure that the world’s richest people maintain and extend their wealth over generations. This fascinating book lifts the veil on how the rich use everything from cash hoarding to tax evasion to trust funds to ensure that the world’s economic system remains unequal.
For decades, a secret army of tax attorneys, accountants and wealth managers has been developing into the shadowy Wealth Defence Industry. These 'agents of inequality' are paid millions to hide trillions for the richest 0.01%.
In this book, inequality expert Chuck Collins, who himself inherited a fortune, interviews the leading players and gives a unique insider account of how this industry is doing everything it can to create and entrench hereditary dynasties of wealth and power. He exposes the inner workings of these "agents of inequality", showing how they deploy anonymous shell companies, family offices, offshore accounts, opaque trusts, and…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
My name is Carl Rhodes, and I am a Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Technology Sydney. Like many others, in recent years I have become increasingly concerned, sometimes angry even, about how the organization of business and the economy is creating massive economic injustice. I am convinced that the economic system that has billionaires at its apex is deeply unfair, creating hardship, pain, and even death for too many people around the world. I am also convinced that we do not have to accept this gross injustice as being inevitable.
Davos is a small town in the Swiss Alps that is the venue for the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting where billionaires, politicians, and celebrities get together to try to come up with solutions to the world’s problems. Peter S. Goodman’s book focuses on what he calls the ‘Davos Men’–the Davos attending billionaires (who are largely men) who speak out about the world’s wrongs while exploiting the global economy for their own financial gain.
What I found especially revealing in Goodman’s book was his meticulous and unrelenting unraveling of the deceitful realities of billionaire power and his trenchant call for the government to free themselves of the vastly undue political influence of the ultra-rich.
A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller * An NPR Best Book of the Year
The New York Times's Global Economics Correspondent masterfully reveals how billionaires' systematic plunder of the world-brazenly accelerated during the pandemic-has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy.
"Davos Man will be read a hundred years from now as a warning." -Evan Osnos
"Excellent. A powerful, fiery book, and it could well be an essential one." -NPR.org
The history of the last half century in America, Europe, and other major economies is in large part the story of wealth flowing upward. The most affluent people emerged from capitalism's…
My name is Carl Rhodes, and I am a Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Technology Sydney. Like many others, in recent years I have become increasingly concerned, sometimes angry even, about how the organization of business and the economy is creating massive economic injustice. I am convinced that the economic system that has billionaires at its apex is deeply unfair, creating hardship, pain, and even death for too many people around the world. I am also convinced that we do not have to accept this gross injustice as being inevitable.
Jonathan Taplin’s excellent book focuses on just four billionaires–Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. What I found special about this book is that it shows how these billionaires have created and sold utopian futures to the world, whether they come in the form of the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, or transhumanism.
Even more disturbing is Taplin’s argument that under the pretense of these utopias, billionaires have been able to grow their wealth and power without interference from the government. Meanwhile, inequality continues to expand, nature is replaced with technology, and oligarchy gets more and more entrenched. In short, billionaire utopian visions are a distraction from the real and present danger of gross economic inequality.
'A wake-up call ... fascinating' Scott Galloway, author of The Four
'Please read this' Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media
From the author of Move Fast and Break Things comes a withering takedown of four billionaires (from Andreessen to Zuckerberg) who are selling us fantasies while the world burns.
At a time when multiple crises are compounding to create epic inequality, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme - from the metaverse to cryptocurrency, space travel and transhumanism - is an existential…
Since I was a student, I have been fascinated with social and economic inequality–the more so because back then, my professors seemed to disregard this subject of study. So, I made it one of my own main areas of research: I simply needed to understand more about the nature and the causes of inequality in human societies. In recent years, I have been busy researching economic inequality in different historical settings, also looking at specific socioeconomic strata. I began with the poor, and more recently, I focused on the rich. In my list of recommendations, I included books that, I believe, are particularly insightful concerning wealth and the wealthy.
Among all recent non-academic books on the lives, deeds, and misdeeds of the super-rich across history, John Kampfner’s book is, in my view, the best.
Kampfner selects fascinating examples, ranging from the Classical Age until today, and does not limit himself to the West. His narrative is engaging and often witty.
This is not an academic book, but it is pretty well-researched. Although it makes some concessions to the “eat the rich” tendencies of our times, overall, the book provides a convincing and valuable picture of the sins (and less so, of the virtues) of the most affluent across history.
From the Orwell Prize shortlisted author of Freedom for Sale, The Rich is the fascinating history of how economic elites from ancient Egypt to the present day have gained and spent their money.
Starting with the Romans and Ancient Egypt and culminating with the oligarchies of modern Russia and China, it compares and contrasts the rich and powerful down the ages and around the world. What unites them? Have the same instincts of entrepreneurship, ambition, vanity, greed and philanthropy applied throughout?
As contemporary politicians, economists and the public wrestle with the inequities of our time - the parallel world inhabited…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Life well-being has many domains beyond finances, including family, friends, health, work, education, religion, and more. I know that financial well-being is necessary for life well being but it is not sufficient. Our older daughter lives with bipolar illness. Our life well-being was decimated years ago when my daughter’s illness was diagnosed. But we’ve learned to alleviate well-being injuries in one domain from well-being medicine from the same domain and from other domains. Our younger daughter loves her sister and cares for her, and our ample finances domain lets us support our older daughter without constraining our own budget.
Rachel Sherman’s book let me peek into the lives of people much richer than me, people whose annual income is in the millions and whose wealth is many multiples of their income.
They enjoy high financial well-being, yet many suffer diminished life well-being because they compare themselves to those even richer. One wealthy woman said that she does not feel wealthy because she knows many wealthier people with drivers and private planes.
A surprising and revealing look at how today's elite view their wealth and place in society
From TV's "real housewives" to The Wolf of Wall Street, our popular culture portrays the wealthy as materialistic and entitled. But what do we really know about those who live on "easy street"? In this penetrating book, Rachel Sherman draws on rare in-depth interviews that she conducted with fifty affluent New Yorkers-from hedge fund financiers and artists to stay-at-home mothers-to examine their lifestyle choices and understanding of privilege. Sherman upends images of wealthy people as invested only in accruing social advantages for themselves and…
