World Economics

By the author of How To Calm Your Mind, a practical guide to managing your attention—the most powerful resource you have to get stuff done, become more creative, and live a meaningful life Our attention has never been as overwhelmed as it is today. Many of us recognize that our brains struggle...

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.”—The Wall Street Journal From the Palantir co-founder, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of...

Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance. Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress.

Shortlisted for the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Economist “Framed as a biography of Jensen Huang, the only CEO Nvidia has ever had, the book is also something more interesting and revealing: a window onto the intellectual, cultural, and...

China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® is a concise introduction to the most astonishing economic growth story of the last three decades. In the 1980s, China was an impoverished backwater, struggling to escape the political turmoil and economic mismanagement of the Mao era. Today it is the world's second biggest economy, the largest manufacturing and trading nation, the consumer of half the world's steel and coal, the biggest source of international tourists, and one of the most influential investors in developing countries from southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America.

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics upend the most common assumptions about how economics works in this gripping and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live. Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs?...

It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes' acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultural mores and historical circumstance.

The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary” story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative (Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth). Palo Alto’s weather is...

A New York Times Bestseller The world’s leading intellectual offers a probing examination of the waning American Century, the nature of U.S. policies post-9/11, and the perils of valuing power above democracy and human rights In an incisive, thorough analysis of the current international...

“For anyone wanting to find out more about the world we live in . . . there is one simple answer: read Noam Chomsky.” —The New Statesman A sharp indictment of both American foreign policy and the national myths that support it, and an urgent warning of the threat that U.S. power poses to...

A Next Big Idea Book Club March 2025 Must-Read An urgent and illuminating perspective that offers a window into how the most pernicious aspects of the venture capital ethos is reaching all areas of our lives, into everything from healthcare to food to entertainment to the labor market and...

Why globalization failed so many Americans and how it still can be saved despite burgeoning economic nationalism. The triumphant globalization that began in the 1990s has given way to a world riven by conflict, populism, and economic nationalism. In The World’s Worst Bet, David J. Lynch...

How the world’s oldest asset secretly shapes our modern economy In The Land Trap, Mike Bird—Wall Street editor at The Economist—reveals how this ancient asset still exerts outsize influence over the modern world. From the speculative land grabs of colonial America to China's real estate...

The New York Times bestselling, groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve. An essential read for understanding some of the egregious abuses of power that...

Established in 1918–19, in the wake of Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the First World War and the revolution that followed swiftly on its heels, the Weimar Republic ushered in widespread social reform, a radical cultural flowering and the most democratic conditions the German people had ever known. The Weimar Years is a vivid narrative of a dramatic period in German history. Year by year, from 1918 to 1933, Frank McDonough covers the major events in both domestic and foreign policy and the personalities who shaped them, together with developments in music, art, theatre and literature.

The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to its primary cause. Capitalism demands perpetual expansion, which is devastating the living world. There is only one solution that will lead to meaningful and immediate change: degrowth.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * How has a small nation of 9 million people, forced to fight for its existence and security since its founding and riven by ethnic, religious, and economic divides, proven resistant to so many of the societal ills plaguing other wealthy democracies? Why do Israelis...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Bestselling economist Jeff Rubin warns that the shock inflation of 2021 is the front of a perfect storm of war, supply-chain disruption, geopolitical realignment, domestic upheaval, and energy scarcity that will change everything. During the pandemic, government deficits...

In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations. “A towering achievement.... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first...