100 Books Like The Economics of Blockchain Consensus

This book helped me understand why advances in artificial intelligence are going to have a big impact on productivity and economic growth. I loved the analogies to old technologies like electrification of factories, and newer examples like how Team New Zealand used simulations to change racing tactics and boat design.

The book has an important, big idea at its heart. That idea is that AI helps organizations make better predications, and those better predictions allow organizations to be fundamentally redesigned to take advantage of this. This is where the AI productivity revolution comes from.

Michael Lewis is a master at exposing the mechanisms behind financial and technological disasters, and this book is no exception. His deep access to Sam Bankman-Fried makes this a rare inside look at how Silicon Valley hubris can spiral into catastrophe. If we want to build a better future, we have to understand how influential failures happen—and how movements with promise can go off the rails.

I was especially interested in this story because of SBF’s ties to Effective Altruism, a movement with real potential that will now always carry his shadow. As I build my own initiatives—like OpenDI in decision intelligence—this book reinforced the importance of staying vigilant against the forces that can derail even the most well-intentioned ideas.

Well, the author is a friend of mine but it’s also on a topic close to my own academic research interests. So it was kind of compulsory reading for me, but it might be the most enjoyable compulsory reading I’ve ever done.

I thought NFTs were just a gimmick to do with internet pictures. But the authors explain, with great examples, that NFTs are best thought of as a new technology for creating digital assets. And better still, providing the true owner with irrefutable proof of ownership of these digital assets.

What I took away was that NFTs are a new technology for tracking property rights. And since property rights have been fundamental to economic development for millennia, this is a topic one can’t afford not to understand.

I first heard about this book on one of my favorite podcasts: Hard Fork. The author is a famous crypto investor at perhaps the world’s leading technology venture capital firm: a16z. The author got a hard time from the hosts, who are both pretty skeptical of crypto. But he handled it so well I knew I had to read the book.

Read Write Own is persuasive in cautioning against dismissing the entire crypto sector due to early failures. The examples used are great: like the Helium project—a kind of crowdsourced “people’s 5G network” that uses cryptocurrency payments as incentives. If you want to hear the “glass is half full” case for crypto, this is a must read.

The book provides an excellent introduction to the philosophical foundations of economic analysis as a normative theory of human behavior and as a tool for public policy making.

It lucidly explains and criticizes the building blocks of welfare economics – the normative branch of economic analysis.

I believe Landsburg, whom I have met, may be one of the most creative and interesting thinkers in America today.

I love this book because it is his personality on every page: quirky, creative, and entertaining. It asks and answers questions others have never even considered or incorrectly assumed are so obvious as to not be worth the time to explore. I use questions from this book, which is 30+ years old, to stump and pique the curiosity of my students every semester.

Even a professional economist is likely to find something surprising in this book. 

Editor John Siegfried has collected a dozen essays written by notable and award-winning economists explaining how economic research has improved our lives over the past two generations. Several of these essays do not focus on obvious examples but rather on those that are a step or two removed from what many laypersons would consider the domain of economics.

For example, Alvin Roth’s chapter on “deferred-acceptance theory” describes how economics improved the efficiency of educating doctors by better matching prospective medical residents with training hospitals. 

Other chapters explore how economic research helped eliminate the military draft and replace it with an all-volunteer armed service, how economists shaped the welfare-to-work reforms of the 1990s, and the impact of economic research on the allocation of the radio spectrum which was necessary to establish our modern cell phone networks.

Read anything by Mirowski. By far the best writer in the field today.

Highly original, massively intelligent, stimulating, witty, deeply informed, a trenchant writer. His life’s work is to probe the validity and scientific pretensions of the discipline.

The critiques are biting, all the more so for the real-world authority wielded by economists. That he is sometimes a provocative maverick adds to the appeal.

Machine Dreams argued implausibly (for its time) that economics had embraced robotic simulation. The emergence of AI shows how far ahead of its time it was.

A better read than most straight economics. 

I first purchased and read this book as a senior undergraduate student not knowing anything about the author.

Little did I know that this book would later play an important role in not only understanding the limitations of mainstream economics but also in providing me with an alternative approach to make sense of our economic surroundings. 

Bharadwaj’s book is truly a classic and one that I always recommend to my students. 

Her book continues to inspire and educate me.

For anyone interested in a comfortable tour through some of the greatest economists, this book is a must-read.

It is like having a personal conversation with the world's leading economic masterminds, as it explores their beliefs, backgrounds, and legacies. This book is well-written and easy to follow, making it an excellent choice for anyone.

Economics is not only concerned with fiscal policies and national economies. And this book does a good job of illustrating the fact that Economics plays a role in almost every aspect of human life.

Furthermore, I would like to acknowledge the inclusion of Daniel Kahneman in the book, an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel Prize winner whose empirical findings challenged the assumption of human rationality, i.e. the foundation of modern Economics.