100 Books Like Stone Age Economics

Why is it that looking at the past, reading our history, studying ancient ruins, makes me feel better about facing today’s world?

I think about connection, a feeling that, despite having lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, there are still shared goals and commonalities between myself and them. 

Harari is one of those rare authors who can distill enormous amounts of information into a single sentence and hold your attention at the same time. Early in the book, Harari explains that as humans evolved to walk upright, the narrowing of the pelvis and hips made childbirth more treacherous. His line for this: “Women paid extra.” As a mother myself, when I read that line, it felt so modern, so lived-in, like the same line could describe my own feelings today.

Books like Sapiens aren’t really about the biology of humans, but about finding our humanity within a scientific exploration.… show more.

I like books that change the very ways in which I see and understand the world.

Polanyi’s The Great Transformation from the end of WW2 made it much clearer to me how a world which regularly finds technological solutions to humankind’s problems could also descend into barbarism. Modern capitalism’s subordinating the functioning of society to the demands of the market changes the status of nature itself in ways that I am increasingly aware of, as the ecological crisis threatens the very survival of humankind.

The book appeals to me not least because of the ways in which it draws important philosophical conclusions from a detailed historical narrative rather than just stating theoretical positions.

If there is one foundational text in economic anthropology, this is it. The French anthropologist Mauss showed, in this 1924 book, that gift exchange is the glue that connects people in communities with no formal authority. He is perfectly aware that there are no free gifts, but shows that all economic transactions have a moral element: They create social obligations, they connect us to each other.

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. 

Raworth articulates something I'd felt but couldn't express: that our current economic models are fundamentally flawed, simultaneously transgressing planetary boundaries whilst leaving billions below social foundations.

Her doughnut framework—depicting the safe and just space between social foundations and ecological ceilings—clarifies the "why of work.”

I love how she challenges conventional economic thinking with such clarity and wit. When she explains why GDP growth can't be our goal, or why economies are embedded within society and nature (not the other way around), it feels both radical and obvious.

As a member organization of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, I've seen how this framework helps businesses understand their purpose beyond profit.

This book provides the destination; my work explores the organizational navigation, the concrete patterns and structures that enable businesses to actually operate in that safe and just space.

Some people are sticklers for following norms and conventions, while others take a more relaxed approach. The same goes for entire cultures, which vary on a continuum from very tight (think Singapore or the military) to very loose (think Amsterdam or hippy communes). This book brings together a wealth of experimental data showing that societal norms tighten or loosen in response to perceptions of threat.

Even though the specific nature of those threats inevitably varies and the cultural systems of the scores of societies in which Gelfand has gathered data are diverse, the same underlying patterns are discernible everywhere. Gelfand’s work explores the profound ramifications of this discovery both for our understanding of history and of the world we live in today. 

Why do humans everywhere imagine themselves to share the world with supernatural agents of various kinds? Many scholars have pointed out the usefulness of supernatural agent concepts in providing reassurance, political legitimacy, a rationale for suffering, or a theory of our collective origins or destinies. But this does not explain why we come up with those specific types of constructs in the first place.

Pascal Boyer proposes a surprising and compelling solution. The reason we entertain particular kinds of ideas about supernatural agents, he argues, is because of the way our cognitive systems evolved.

How and why have societies grown in size and complexity since the advent of farming? The tragic answer to this question lies partly in the evolution of a very specific kind of cooperation: warfare. Turchin presents a theory of how warfare increased the scale of cooperation over the course of world history but also sows seeds of conflict between the haves and the have-nots, stoking internecine conflict and dissolution.

Turchin’s ideas have contributed to our stock of plausible hypotheses about the human past, and he is one of a handful of scientists committed to testing them even-handedly.  

Mainstream economic accounts of culture are prone to treat culture as a set of norms or informal institutions which constrain economic behavior: ‘don’t charge interest,’ ‘don’t sell kidneys,’ or ‘always tip at a bar’. Storr presents an alternative account of culture as the animating spirit of an economy, which he illustrates through various entrepreneurial spirits which shape the direction of an economy. This book is the perfect combination of serious anthropological theory (Geertz) and an appreciation of the market process. Culture is not that which obstructs market, but that what brings economies to life. 

Before there was money, people bartered one kind of stuff they had in abundance for another kind that they needed (or wanted). That may be true, but little appreciated in our market-oriented Western worldview, there was once an even older gift economy.

The Gift, among other related topics, explores the gift economy, which characterized the lifeways of many American Indian peoples. Hyde provides the key to understanding many of the stories in our book.

Hunters are portrayed as “visiting” the lodges of beavers, moose, and bear. They come bearing gifts that only humans can create through artifice or cultivation: knives and tobacco, for example—things much prized by the animal recipients.

In turn—but not necessarily in return—the animals give the humans their flesh and fur. The bones are their somatic souls, which should not be broken, but returned to the element from which they came—earth or water—to be reclothed in flesh… show more.