To better understand the Russia-Ukraine crisis, we have put together a list of the most relevant books that shed light on the history, socio-economic and political relations of these two neighboring countries as well as titles that provide additional context to the historical and evolving war tactics at play. “An
Masaaki Shirakawa— Currently, overnight interbank interest rates in many developed economies are zero or slightly negative, and long-term interest rates are also extremely low. Did policymakers and economists expect it to happen and persist, say, twenty years ago? Back then, only Japan experienced such a situation, and it was regarded
Scott Cunningham— Certain presentations of causal inference methodologies have sometimes been described as atheoretical, but in my opinion, while some practitioners seem comfortable flying blind, the actual methods employed in causal designs are always deeply dependent on theory and local institutional knowledge. It is my firm belief that without prior
Robert Skidelsky— The need for economists to think about economics became apparent after the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. Few economists predicted the crash; more damningly, few envisaged the possibility that such a collapse could occur, any more than the crash of an algorithmic system. Students of economics asked: what
Janek Wasserman— Americans searching Amazon’s best-seller list in June 2010 would have encountered a surprising title at the top, above the likes of books by Stieg Larsson, George W. Bush, Malcolm Gladwell, and Michael Lewis: Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. The “Definitive Edition” had appeared in 2007, yet it sold only
Christopher Marquis— In 2012, the late Lynn Stout, a renowned legal scholar at Cornell Law School, published The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public, a no-holds-barred exposé of the lies the corporate world tells itself about shareholder primacy and an explanation of why
George Magnus— When Mark Antony utters the words ‘let slip the dogs of war’ after the assassination of Julius Caesar, he is thought to be referring to devices in civilised societies that allow or inhibit war. For a long time, China and the US have had spats over specific trade
Jeannette Graulau— From David Landes’s Prometheus Unbound to Giovanni Arrighi’s Origins of Our Times, scholars continue to quarrel over one of the most difficult questions of all time: the why, how, and where of the origins of capitalism. Some return to the inexhaustible argument of England’s Industrial Revolution. Others, demystifying
Janek Wasserman— Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is inarguably the most famous book associated with the Austrian School of Economics. The basic premises of Hayek’s argument are well known: “socialist” trends in German thought now threatened Western democracies; fascism and Nazism were the necessary outcome of those trends; government planning undermined
Nomi Claire Lazar— The importance of genericism to the primitivist frame is evident from its reliance on abstraction. This becomes clear in contrast with an Aristotelian perspective on development. For Aristotle, the highest form of human personality is to become a person of virtue and sound judgment, engaged in a