100 Books Like The Architecture of Markets

McMillan offers a highly readable and concise book on how economists understand market institutions.

I love to assign this book to my undergraduate students because McMillan makes sense of some fairly complex topics, such as auction design. And he covers a wide range of topics of current interest, such as corporate governance and intellectual property rights.

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.

Pistor’s book explains how global finance grew so large, powerful, and unstable. The short answer: elite lawyers did it.

Pistor argues that they did it by creatively devising legal instruments that could turn both tangible (land, for example) and intangible things (like intellectual property) into capital. When lawyers were able to make legal instruments enforceable around the world, capital could become truly global. Why did they do this? Simple: “minting” capital through creative lawyering is extraordinarily lucrative.

Before reading this book, I knew that elite contract lawyers were very well compensated, but I didn’t understand what they were doing and didn’t think of them as key players shaping the international economic order. Pistor’s book informed and corrected my thinking. 

Why do governments have to make markets work?

Well for one thing, firms might prefer to collude rather than to compete, if given the choice. So we need antitrust policy to make them compete.

Philippon surveys developments over the past few decades, demonstrating how the United States has weakened antitrust policy and enforcement while Europe has strengthened it.

He also looks at particular sectors, with a particularly compelling chapter on how the U.S. financial sector has grown without delivering more value to consumers and investors.

A People’s Guide is just a lively, accessible, and up-to-date guide to the basics of capitalism. Hadas Thier explains complex ideas in a simple and engaging way with excellent day-to-day examples. It’s economics for those who want to understand and dismantle the world of the 1%. And it’s written not from an academic but from an activist viewpoint.

The important argument lying at the heart of this beautifully written book is that the trajectory of the current global economy, driven by neoliberal logics, is fundamentally one of expulsions: that is, expelling the poor, the biosphere, democracy, and anything else that gets in the way of maximizing profit. This book takes massive case studies—from palm oil production in Malaysia and Indonesia to water bottling by large corporations in the US—and demonstrates how they are ultimately about pushing people out instead of inviting people in. It raises important questions about who the economy is for, and what ends we are ultimately building toward as a global society. I don’t have a pithy personal story about this book; I just think you should read it.

Bell, one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century, argues that having the right culture is essential for capitalism (or any other economic or political system) to flourish – and I certainly agree. But he goes further: he worries that over time the economic gains that capitalism delivers end up undermining the cultural conditions that allow capitalism to flourish in the first place. His book is about the role of culture more broadly, not religion in particular, but religion certainly fits within the overall argument.

I was born at the end of the 1980s and the majority of greenhouse gas emissions have been released in my lifetime. That means the world’s emitted more since Seinfeld was first broadcast than in the previous 10 millennia of human history. But this isn’t just a story of the last few decades or of certain bad technologies that use fossil fuels. It’s a story going back centuries, to the emergence of global systems of profit-making that impelled people across the world to seek people and nature to exploit for money. This book has been invaluable in helping me understand that history and in seeing the environmental crisis foremost as a crisis of politics and of the great economic systems that dominate our world. 

This book is one of the most effective attacks against the market tendency to commercialize any good, ending up corroding what is most intrinsically human in social relationships and in people's intimate lives.

The effectiveness of the book lies in the examples, ranging from the sale of kidneys to paying someone to be substituted in the queue.

The most important lesson of the book is that market-driven economic growth has not only transformed the environment to make our lives more comfortable, thus hitting the limit in environmental degradation, but it has also transformed ourselves, because it has made us more consumers and less human.

This silent transformation - the philosopher Sandel teaches us - must be limited.

Mass democracy guided the 20th century. Socialists and liberals disagreed about what exactly a government “of, for, and by the people” would look like, but they agreed that, in principle, it was desirable.

Even the fascists agreed. “Fascism,” wrote Mussolini, “is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered from the point of view of quality rather than quantity... a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live.”

But by the end of the century, democracy gave way to another ideal: special “zones” punched holes in the image of a democratic nation state with micro-nations and gated communities, crypto-currencies and special economic zones, charter schools and AirBnB schemes.

Slobodian's Crack-up Capitalism traces the emergence of this new social ideal. It examines the theory and practice of privately managed spaces erected to protect capitalism from democracy, markets from politics, profit… show more.