Here are 100 books that The Will to Improve fans have personally recommended if you like
The Will to Improve.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I became an academic because I believe knowledge should serve the world. I'm driven by a commitment to responsibility, realism, and social good, even when it's uncomfortable. This list reflects my frustration with how often Western governments act confidently but without the right philosophies, systems, and knowledge in place. They lack imagination, organisation, and the ability to deal with crises, which populist movements are now exploiting. I've spent years researching failed interventions because I believe we owe it to others to do better. These books helped me understand the world more clearly, but also reminded me of our limitations and how hard it is to grasp the contexts we shape.
This book helped me see how much damage is done when treating the world as simple.
Escobar never mentions complexity theory, but that's precisely what animates his critique—a sense that development thinking flattens difference, reduces context, and imposes order where none exists. I'd long been uneasy with how the West 'solves' problems it helped create. This book gave me the conceptual tools to see why: it exposed development as a discourse that makes the world legible in Western terms, only to intervene on that basis.
What I love about this book is its refusal to accept those terms. It shows how we get the world wrong by insisting it should resemble us in the West, and why the costs of that are always borne elsewhere.
How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses? To answer these questions, Arturo Escobar shows how development policies became mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts. The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. "Development" was not…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am an anthropologist of development who has conducted ethnographic research in India, Indonesia, and more recently, Australia. Throughout my career I have grappled with questions of how power works in development, particularly in and through processes of self-making. I seek new theoretical tools to examine these questions, but always grounded in the realities of the everyday. I came of age when post-development critiques were dominant, but both my idealism and cynicism have been tempered by working alongside local development actors. In my work I try to give readers a sympathetic portrait of their lives, beliefs, and hopes, and how these shape practices, relationships, and consequences of ‘development’.
Akhil Gupta asks why so many people in India suffer extreme poverty, and yet invite so little reaction.
His answer is structural violence. State inaction, or ineffective action, are part of the conditions that let people die from poverty.
The brilliance in Akhil Gupta’s work is inviting us to look at the state not as a coherent and unified entity, but as operating through multiple levels, agencies, and departments.
As someone interested in local development actors, I find his ethnographic accounts of low-level government offices and officials particularly compelling.
By showing everyday practices in these offices, and fine-grained encounters between officials and welfare recipients, Gupta shows how state indifference is produced, and challenged, in ways that shape life and death.
Red Tape presents a major new theory of the state developed by the renowned anthropologist Akhil Gupta. Seeking to understand the chronic and widespread poverty in India, the world's fourth largest economy, Gupta conceives of the relation between the state in India and the poor as one of structural violence. Every year this violence kills between two and three million people, especially women and girls, and lower-caste and indigenous peoples. Yet India's poor are not disenfranchised; they actively participate in the democratic project. Nor is the state indifferent to the plight of the poor; it sponsors many poverty amelioration programs.
I am an anthropologist of development who has conducted ethnographic research in India, Indonesia, and more recently, Australia. Throughout my career I have grappled with questions of how power works in development, particularly in and through processes of self-making. I seek new theoretical tools to examine these questions, but always grounded in the realities of the everyday. I came of age when post-development critiques were dominant, but both my idealism and cynicism have been tempered by working alongside local development actors. In my work I try to give readers a sympathetic portrait of their lives, beliefs, and hopes, and how these shape practices, relationships, and consequences of ‘development’.
I have been fascinated with selfhood, the cultivation of ‘subjects of development’ as either targets, or ‘trustees’ of aid, since my PhD.
Anand Pandian’s Crooked Stalks offers a nuanced, careful, and ultimately beautiful account of how moral selves are cultivated among the Kallar caste near Madurai in Tamil Nadu, India.
Development looms large among the Kallar, what Pandian describes as a ‘moral horizon’ that is an impetus to transform people’s lives and the material environment.
In presenting an impressive breadth of historical material alongside ethnographic description he shows the remnants of colonial rule in contemporary virtues, contributing to understanding the ‘postcolonial self’.
How do people come to live as they ought to live? Crooked Stalks seeks an answer to this enduring question in diverse practices of cultivation: in the moral horizons of development intervention, in the forms of virtue through which people may work upon their own desires, deeds, and habits, and in the material labors that turn inhabited worlds into environments for both moral and natural growth. Focusing on the colonial subjection and contemporary condition of the Piramalai Kallar caste-classified, condemned, and policed for decades as a "criminal tribe"-Anand Pandian argues that the work of cultivation in all of these senses…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
I am an anthropologist of development who has conducted ethnographic research in India, Indonesia, and more recently, Australia. Throughout my career I have grappled with questions of how power works in development, particularly in and through processes of self-making. I seek new theoretical tools to examine these questions, but always grounded in the realities of the everyday. I came of age when post-development critiques were dominant, but both my idealism and cynicism have been tempered by working alongside local development actors. In my work I try to give readers a sympathetic portrait of their lives, beliefs, and hopes, and how these shape practices, relationships, and consequences of ‘development’.
Holly High addresses a question that puzzles students of development studies: why do people engage in development programs when they have such a poor record of success?
It is not due to a lack of cynicism or suspicion. Rather High shows that rural Laos residents continue to hold both unconscious and social desires for development, producing a “shared delirium” that contains its own rationalities.
Notably,Fields of Desire brings Lacanian and Deleuzian theories to the anthropology of development: a welcome respite from Foucault.
It is also an evocative ethnographic account of the experience of poverty, and poverty reduction programs in a Lao village.
High's argument is based on long-term fieldwork in a village in Laos. The village was identified as poor and was the subject of multiple poverty reduction and development interventions. This book looks at how these policies were implemented on the ground, particularly at why such apparently beneficent interventions were received locally with suspicion and disillusionment, often ended in failure, and yet, despite this, were also able to recapture people's desires. High relates this to the ""post-rebellious"" moment in contemporary Laos, the force of aspirations among village residents and locally grounded understandings of the ambivalence of power.
As Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Lucas put it, "Once you start thinking about economic growth, it's hard to think about anything else." That's why I am eager to share the best books on economic development with you! I am a Senior Economist at the World Bank, the world's premier development institution. Over the years, I have developed a deep interest in what makes countries prosper, have published extensively on the topic in academic journals, and earned a PhD in Economics along the way. As a development practitioner, I have been supporting sustainable growth across the globe, with working experience in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific.
I found this book to be a brilliant analysis of how nations can achieve peace and development, stressing the importance of political institutions.
With mathematical precision, quite literally, the book nicely illustrates the fundamental drivers of development: inclusive political institutions and a shared belief in the common good. The absence of those elements can explain the existence of very different development clusters in fragile states that are troubled by poverty, violence, and weak state capacity.
I feel the book does an excellent job of disentangling deeper causes from symptoms of underdevelopment.
"Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." So wrote Adam Smith a quarter of a millennium ago. Using the tools of modern political economics and combining economic theory with a bird's-eye view of the data, this book reinterprets Smith's pillars of prosperity to explain the existence of development clusters - places that tend to combine effective state institutions, the absence of political violence, and high per-capita incomes.…
Bill Poorvu is a successful real estate investor and developer who for 35 years headed the real estate program at Harvard Business School, where he taught several generations of students, many of whom went on to become industry leaders. He is also one of the founders of the Baupost Group, a Boston-based investment firm that is considered one of the savviest hedge funds in the world, with some $30 billion in assets under management.
Successful real estate investment and development is in part the result of understanding an economic contextand taking the long view. Toward those ends, there’s no better jumping-off point than Ray Dalio's historical review of the economic “Big Cycle” that has determined the success and failure of nations and economic systems over the past several centuries. And by the way, Ray knows what he’s talking about: his Bridgewater Associates is the world’s largest hedge fund.
“A provocative read...There are few tomes that coherently map such broad economic histories as well as Mr. Dalio’s. Perhaps more unusually, Mr. Dalio has managed to identify metrics from that history that can be applied to understand today.” —Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times
From legendary investor Ray Dalio, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Principles, who has spent half a century studying global economies and markets, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order examines history’s most turbulent economic and political periods to reveal why the times ahead will likely…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
As host of the Airport Economist TV series I have been to around 60 countries in 5 years and I have always been fascinated by what makes each place tick. I have been curious as to why some countries succeed and others fail, how do businesses operate there and how do the people fare when it comes to elections. I am interested in how egalitarian the place is, how rich are the rich, how do the poor do, is life improving. I am also interested in sport and popular culture and how important it is to the local populace.
This is the best book written on Australian economic history.
How did a convict colony become one of the world’s most prosperous economies and successful democratic societies in just 200 years? McLean takes us methodically through the evidence with a compelling narrative dispelling popular myths along the way.
This book is the first comprehensive account of how Australia attained the world's highest living standards within a few decades of European settlement, and how the nation has sustained an enviable level of income to the present. Why Australia Prospered is a fascinating historical examination of how Australia cultivated and sustained economic growth and success. Beginning with the Aboriginal economy at the end of the eighteenth century, Ian McLean argues that Australia's remarkable prosperity across nearly two centuries was reached and maintained by several shifting factors. These included imperial policies, favorable demographic characteristics, natural resource abundance, institutional adaptability and innovation,…
AO: I have been intrigued by the Adam and smith (a play on Adam Smith’s name due to K. Boulding) of social sciences ever since, as a graduate student, I was given the privilege to teach a history-of-thought course. I found a lot of wisdom in Smith’s works and continue to find it with every new read. BW: I first met Adam Smith when I was studying for my master’s degree in economics almost twenty years ago. Since then, I have enjoyed rereading him, always finding new sources of fascination and insights. For me, Smith's work is endlessly rich and remains astonishingly topical, three centuries after his birth.
Smith is generally considered as the father of economics, laying its foundations in the eighteenth century.
But he can also be an inspiration for rethinking economics (providing more realistic assumptions about human conduct) and laboratory experiments in the twenty-first century, helping us to build a new “Humanomics” (see also McCloskey’s two books on this subject). That’s what Vernon Smith (Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002) and Bart Wilson convincingly argue for in their uncommon and innovative book. Smith is still alive (and well alive) today.
While neo-classical analysis works well for studying impersonal exchange in markets, it fails to explain why people conduct themselves the way they do in their personal relationships with family, neighbors, and friends. In Humanomics, Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon L. Smith and his long-time co-author Bart J. Wilson bring their study of economics full circle by returning to the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith. Sometime in the last 250 years, economists lost sight of the full range of human feeling, thinking, and knowing in everyday life. Smith and Wilson show how Adam Smith's model of sociality can re-humanize twenty-first century…
I’m a Brazilian economist working in Paris and dedicated to historical scholarship. I have always been deeply impressed by the political weight carried by economic arguments across Latin America. Debates on economic policy are typically contentious everywhere, but in Latin America, your alignment with different traditions of political economy can go a long way to determine your intellectual and political identity. At the same time, our condition as peripheral societies – and hence net importers of ideas from abroad – raises perennial questions about the meaning of a truly Latin American political economy. I hope this list will be a useful entry point for people similarly interested in these problems.
The most recent entry on my list is already a landmark achievement.
Margarita Fajardo’s authoritative monograph places the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America – the incubator for the cepalinos who successfully challenged the postwar consensus on developmental policy – into the broader geopolitical history of the 20th century. This richly detailed study retraces the emergence of an intellectual and political movement that channeled discontent with the structural biases inherent in the global economic order into a cogent agenda of political economy for the peripheries of capitalism.
It also reveals how the fragmentation of the fragile postwar liberal consensus, in both North and South, eventually pushed this movement toward the high-powered framework of dependency theory, and thence into anti-establishment activism across the world.
How a group of intellectuals and policymakers transformed development economics and gave Latin America a new position in the world.
After the Second World War demolished the old order, a group of economists and policymakers from across Latin America imagined a new global economy and launched an intellectual movement that would eventually capture the world. They charged that the systems of trade and finance that bound the world's nations together were frustrating the economic prospects of Latin America and other regions of the world. Through the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL, the Spanish and Portuguese acronym, cepalinos…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
My passion for developing entrepreneurial and business instinct is simple. It is all based on confidence. Over time, my experiences have shown me that many leaders (myself included) can end up in “decision paralysis” and default to taking no action at all. Leaders can have all of the information and indicators that a decision is the right thing to do, but they default to doing nothing. By developing a better understanding of my own instincts, I have been able to build confidence in the decisions I have made over the past 20 years, thus eliminating any deterrents from making sound decisions.
Deep Economy takes both macro- and micro-economics and breaks them down to their most simplest levels. Examining what we have learned over time from our expanding economy, McKibben examines all of the positive and negative impacts that have occurred during our country’s growth.
With a focus on understanding how groundbreaking innovations can disrupt numerous industries, Deep Economy takes the approach on what leaders can learn from the past and how breakthroughs can (and will) have unintended consequences whether they are positive or negative. Recognizing these patterns and incorporating them into our business decisions can only help us make better decisions.
In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the biggest challenge in a generation to the prevailing view of our economy. For the first time in human history, he observes, "more" is no longer synonymous with "better" indeed, for many of us, they have become almost opposites. McKibben puts forward a new way to think about the things we buy, the food we eat, the energy we use, and the money that pays for it all. Our purchases, he says, need not be at odds with the things we truly value. McKibben's animating idea is that we need to…
