Classical economics suggests that market economies are self-correcting in times of recession or depression, and tend toward full employment and output. But English economist John Maynard Keynes disagrees. In his ground-breaking 1936 study The General Theory, Keynes argues that traditional economics has misunderstood the causes of unemployment.

When Manias, Panics, and Crashes was published (1978), the world was entering a new period of global economic turbulence. Economists based their analyses on the assumption that investors act rationally and often communicated their ideas with dry, technical language.

Europeans once thought all swans were white, and white' was part of how they defined 'swan.' Then black swans were discovered, and the definition changed forever. I

Considered his most important work, Mahbub ul Haq's Reflections on Human Development appeared at the end of his career in international development, and consolidates his revolutionary contribution to the discipline.

Because the potential returns appear to be greater in poorer countries than in the developed world, modern economic theory implies that rich countries should continually invest in poor countries until returns balance out.

A crititcal analysis of the first work written for the general public by the highly influential American economist Milton Friedman. Capitalism and Freedom argues that economies and societies work best when a free market functions with minimal government interference.

Born in 1961, US anthropologist and activist David Graeber was weaned on leftist politics, and declared himself an anarchist at age 16. He became an anthropology professor, and his early cultural research in Madagascar exposed him to poverty that he saw as caused by pressures to repay excessive government debt.

Ever since the nineteenth century, people have claimed that the prosperity enjoyed by the First World was the result of its devotion to unconstrained economic freedoms. Chang claims that, in fact, First World success was due to exactly the kinds of state intervention that traditional economic thinking consistently opposes today.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is the first book of modern political economy, and still provides the foundation for the study of that discipline. Along with important discussions of economics and political theory, it mixes plain common sense with large measures of history, philosophy, psychology and sociology.

An account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition.