I'm reading Extreme Money by Satyajit Das at the moment, which is brilliant. It's written by an ex-derivatives trader and risk analyst so its coming from someone with a pretty much unparalleled knowledge of the workings of modern day finance and banking and he exposes it all brilliantly.
I've been recommended Ellen Brown's the Web of Debt by a few people and that's on my next to read list - supposed to be excellent.
Lucy Walace
Member
1. Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism, Ozzie Zehner
Finally an economist that "gets" what so many of us environmentalists and activists are overlooking - that alternative energy tech. is also part of the pro-growth economic machine. From the book's website:
We don’t have an energy crisis. We have a consumption crisis. And this book, which takes aim at cherished assumptions regarding energy, offers refreshingly straight talk about what’s wrong with the way we think and talk about the problem. Though we generally believe we can solve environmental problems with more energy—more solar cells, wind turbines, and biofuels—alternative technologies come with their own side effects and limitations...we need to shift our focus away from suspect alternative energies and toward improving social and political fundamentals: walkable communities, improved consumption, enlightened governance, and, most notably, women’s rights.
This particular book isn't coming out until June 2012 but the author has published quite a bit on this subject already - a really important angle on green economics that isn't being covered elsewhere.
2. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber
This has already been summarized above, but I wanted to throw my support behind it as well.
3. Griftopia, Matt Tabaii
Again, already included above but I vote yes.
Piyush
Member
"The end of growth" by Richard Hienberg.
The top economic book has yet to be written. It will what enlightened future generations will practice, it will be a living book. Occupy movement is the beginning of this beginning. I would like to call the future system "sustainy" or "sustainism" or "life-ism" because "economy" is an inadequate and even inappropriate word for a system that is supposed to be much more wholistic. What is needed is a system for sustainability of life on the planet - both human and non-human and the scale of human enterprise constrained well below the planetary limits to give approriate space for existence of other living species, this would be its vision long term and humankind will plan a transition to this steady-state of its diminished scale in a humane and democratic manner. Humankind has no precedent for this kind of system in any previous isms - capitalism, communism, socialism, etc which were introduced at a time when human consciousness was at a much lower and less global scale, so we should not try to force fit ourselves into these inadequate and inappropriate isms of the past. Our global consciousness is starting to rise and is going to rise to levels so high that we will be completely transformed as a result, we are evolving into a new level now, we are maturing as a species.
I don't know about a "top" 5, but 5 that I would definitely recommend (though not all explicitly economic):
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise
William M. Dugger, Corporate Hegemony
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
Harold Laswell, Power: Who Gets What, When, and How?
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital
Douglas D. Edwards
Member
Däv, those are interesting choices. Could you write a paragraph or so about each of these, explaining what they're about and why you picked them as your Top Five? I'm particularly interested in what you have to say about The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills and The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg. Mills was supposed to have been a major influence on "New Left" thought in the 1960s.
OK...
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise - The founder of the Institutionalist/Evolutionary school of economics (you're probably familiar with John Kenneth Galbraith... also an institutionalist) at his best. Thorstein Veblen digs deep in his critique of early twentieth century capitalism by getting at the root of the functional problem with business in the world of the credit economy. Now Veblen can be a little hard to read... so... I'll help some of y'all out by getting to the crux of his argument: In modern capitalism there is an incentives gap between the aims of the productive system in total and the aims of the monied interests at its helm. Business is driven by profit and by incentives toward pecuniary gain. Industry, by its very nature is driven by the instincts of workmanship and idle curiosity. Further, the pecuniary (money related) motive and the aim of industrial efficiency are not always mutually aligned with one another: the industrial system, it's interests reflected in those of the community at large, is not always best represented by those who drive it forward for predatory gain. This is detailed quite well by Naomi Klein a century later in The Shock Doctrine. Moreover, The effect of loan credit on the accumulation of business capital is such as to create a tripartite incentives gap in the modern corporation. Firms are incentivized to borrow so that they may expand their share of sales to undersell firms which do not. In modern business this habit has become so universal as to practically nullify the advantage gained by any business participating in the institution of credit over and against that of any other of its co-participants. Subsequent to this, capital within our present day “credit economy” is based not upon material assets so much as on the prospective earning capacity of a business firm. This predicted earning capacity is not the same as the actual earning capacity of a firm. The result is that the businessman in the modern capitalist market is given incentive to influence the the speculated capacity of his firm to a point well beyond its actual earning capacity so as to incur profits from the stock market; subsequently, the businessman no longer has his eye to the maximization of profits so much as to a maximization of their own personal gain in the capital market. This maximization is usually obtained through deception, pitting the financial interests of business enterprise not only against the interests of the public at large, but also against those of the better capitalistic management of business itself. This is in essence the very point of the stock market as manifest on Wall Street. If there is one book that I believe should be in EVERY Occupiers arsenal, it is this one.
William M. Dugger, Corporate Hegemony - Radical Institutionalist Economics at its best, William Dugger expands on the Veblenian approach through elaborating on the social processes whereby corporate power has come to dominate all of our social institutions throughout many clusters of institutions in society, economic or otherwise. Our economic, political, military, educational, religious and even family kinship institutions have become big business in America. This, Dugger argues, is no accident. It is rather the process of the acquisition of power by the corporate institutions which we've created to maintain our economic habits.
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite & Harold Laswell, Power: Who Gets What, When, and How? - Focusing on on the folks who have garnered power within society to themselves, how they did so and how they maintain their power Mills & Laswell both paint very useful frameworks of analysis. These 2 books should be in the hands of anyone who is actively engaged in challenging authority to push power to concede to popular demand.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism - In here Marxist tour de force, Luxemburg expands upon the ideas of Marx laid out in Volume II of Capital to explain, among other things, how war is a mechanism whereby the state could secure a continuation of the exploitation of surplus value within a capitalist market. Luxemburg pulls no punches in her analysis which could as easily be applied to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today as it was to WWI in her own time.
gliftor
Member
I'm recommending "Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us" by John Quiggin. Despite the title and cover, this is a serious book by an econ professor. It describes the evolution of some of the key ideas of neoclassical economics, and shows how they have been proven false by the economic crisis to which they've contributed. These ideas still exist as "zombies" in opinion articles and the statements of politicians because no new consensus has come along to replace them. If we're looking at creating a new consensus, we ought to be able to see through the pseudosophisticated terminology used by right-wing writers on economic issues: the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, real business cycles, Ricardian equivalence, general equilibrium models, and blah blah blah. If nothing else, this book will help you understand the ideas that Paul Krugman attacks in many of his "wonkish" NYT blog posts.
tmrykalo
Member
Without having read through all previous posts:
*Sustainable Capitalism by John Ikerd
*Freefall by Joseph Stiglitz
*The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster
*Green Economics: An Introduction To Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato
*The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report- the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (a starting point only)
Finished Extreme Money now and honestly can't recommend this book enough! The summary from amazon:
"The human race created money and finance. But our inventions re-create us. Mankind mistook money—a lubricant of society and human well-being—for an end in itself. Finance, the monetary shadow of real things, came to dominate human reality. Extreme Money tells the story of how this happened—and, in so doing, it tells the story of the modern world.
Bestselling author Satyajit Das draws on 33 years of personal experience at the heart of modern global finance to narrate this story. Das reveals the spectacular, dangerous money games that have generated increasingly massive bubbles of fake growth, Ponzi prosperity, sophistication, and wealth—while endangering the jobs, possessions, and futures of virtually everyone outside the financial industry. Das shows how “extreme money” has become ever more unreal; how “voodoo banking” continues to generate massive phony profits even now; and how a new generation of “Masters of the Universe” has come to dominate the world.
Extreme Money is about:
The new financial fundamentalism: false gods, false prophets - Faith in money, faith in risk, faith in shadows
The cult of risk and the growth engine that isn’t - How financial engineering replaced real engineering and illusions replaced reality
Financial alchemy and the “Doomsday Debt Machine”- The rise of the global financial machine we cannot escape
The new global oligarchy—and the nihilistic games they play - Too smart, too fast, too greedy, too self-absorbed—and far too dangerous"
