A Bibliography

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Posted 2026-04-13

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A

Acemoglu2023: Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. PublicAffairs, 2023, 9781541702530. Argues that technological progress has historically served elites over workers, and outlines what would be needed to redirect it toward shared prosperity.
Achen2017: Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton University Press, 2017, 9781400888740. Challenges the idea that elections produce representative government, arguing that voters choose based on group identity and retrospective satisfaction rather than policy.
Adelstein2023: Jake Adelstein: The Last Yakuza Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld. Scribe, 2023 (original 2010), 9781957363578. A journalist’s firsthand account of decades covering the Yakuza, Japan’s organized crime syndicates, and the underworld culture surrounding them.
Allport1954: Gordon W. Allport: The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley, 1954. Foundational psychological study of the origins and mechanisms of prejudice, establishing contact theory as a path to reducing intergroup hostility.
Anderson2018: Carol Anderson: One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. Bloomsbury, 2018, 9781635571394. Documents the systematic legal and administrative strategies used after the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act to suppress turnout among Black, Latino, and low-income voters.
Andreessen2023: Marc Andreessen: “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Andreessen Horowitz, 2023. Silicon Valley venture capitalist’s self-serving manifesto arguing that technology is an unambiguous force for human progress and that pessimism about it is irrational.
Arendt2006: Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin, 2006 (original 1963), 9780143039884. Report on the trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, introducing the concept of the “banality of evil” to describe how ordinary people commit atrocities within institutional structures.

B

Babiak2019: Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare: Snakes in Suits: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office (revised ed.). HarperBusiness, 2019 (original 2006), 9780062697547. Examines how psychopathic personality traits (charm, ruthlessness, and lack of empathy) can enable corporate success while causing organizational harm.
Baiocchi2005: Gianpaolo Baiocchi: Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre. Stanford University Press, 2005, 9780804751230. Studies the participatory budgeting experiment in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Bakan2005: Joel Bakan: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Simon and Shuster, 2005, 9780743247467. Argues that the modern corporation, by legal mandate and design, behaves like a psychopath.
Baldwin2014: Peter Baldwin: The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle. Princeton University Press, 2014, 9781400851911. Traces three centuries of transatlantic disputes over copyright law, showing how cultural and economic interests have repeatedly clashed over who owns creative work.
Banaji2013: Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald: Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Delacorte, 2013, 9780553804645. Reports decades of research showing that most people, including those who explicitly reject prejudice, harbor automatic associations between social groups in ways that affect their judgments and behavior.
Bandura1999: Albert Bandura: “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 1999, 10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3. Analyzes the psychological mechanisms (moral justification, euphemistic labeling, and diffusion of responsibility) that allow people to commit harmful acts without feeling culpable.
Barthes1972: Roland Barthes: Mythologies (translated by Annette Lavers). Hill and Wang, 1972 (original 1957), 9780374521509. Shows how myths naturalize what are actually historical, ideological constructions to make happenstance appear inevitable.
Beard2017: Mary Beard: Women & Power: A Manifesto. Profile Books, 2017, 9781788160612. Traces two thousand years of women’s exclusion from public speech and power, arguing that the patterns are structural and require more than individual success to change.
Becker1971: Gary S. Becker: The Economics of Discrimination (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press, 1971, 9780226041162. Argued that employers who discriminate pay a competitive cost, and incorrectly predicted that market forces would eventually eliminate labor discrimination.
Beckerman2022: Gal Beckerman: The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas. Crown, 2022, 9781524759186. Traces how radical social movements have historically incubated in “slow media” like letters, pamphlets, and newsletters before breaking into public consciousness.
Bellos2024: David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu: Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs. WW Norton, 2024, 9781324073710. A history of copyright law that shows how it has consistently favored powerful intermediaries over creators and users.
Berlin1991: Isaiah Berlin: The Crooked Timber Of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, 9780679401315. Essays arguing that the pursuit of utopian ideals inevitably leads to violence when imposed on the real world.
Bernays2024: Edward L. Bernays: Propaganda. Martino Fine Books, 2024 (original 1928), 9781684228416. The foundational text of modern public relations, arguing that manufactured consent through propaganda is necessary and beneficial in a mass democracy.
Black2001: Edwin Black: IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Crown, 2001, 9780609607992. Documents IBM’s business relationship with Nazi Germany, showing how its punch-card technology enabled the systematic identification and persecution of Jews.
Black2005: William K. Black: The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry. University of Texas Press, 2005, 9780292706385. Forensic analysis of how savings-and-loan executives in the 1980s systematically looted their own institutions with the complicity of regulators and politicians.
Blackmon2008: Douglas A. Blackmon: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Doubleday, 2008, 9780385722704. Documents how Southern states re-imposed forced labor on Black Americans after the Civil War through convict leasing and debt peonage.
Blasi2013: Joseph R. Blasi, Richard B. Freeman, and Douglas L. Kruse: The Citizen’s Share: Putting Ownership Back into Democracy. Yale University Press, 2013, 9780300209334. Historical and economic argument for broadening employee ownership as a way to share the gains from capitalism more widely.
Board2005: Belinda J. Board and Katarina Fritzon: “Disordered Personalities at Work.” Psychology, Crime & Law, 11(1), 2005, 10.1080/10683160310001634304. Study finding that senior British executives score higher on several psychopathic personality traits than criminal inmates in a high-security hospital.
Bollier2014: David Bollier: Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (2nd. ed.). New Society Publishers, 2025, 9781774060117. Accessible introduction to the concept of the commons—shared resources governed collectively.
Bowles2011: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis: A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton University Press, 2011, 9780691151250. Argues that humans evolved as a fundamentally cooperative species, not as self-interested maximizers.
Boyce2010: Christopher J. Boyce, Gordon D. A. Brown, and Simon C. Moore: “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction.” Psychological Science, 21(4), 2010, 10.1177/0956797610362671. Study showing that relative income predicts life satisfaction better than absolute income.
Bracha2019: Oren Bracha: Owning Ideas: The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property, 1790-1909. Cambridge University Press, 2019, 9781108790697. A history of how American intellectual property law developed from competing visions of authorship, invention, and the public good.
Brandt2007: Allan M. Brandt: The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. Basic Books, 2007, 9780465070480. A history of how the tobacco industry created, marketed, and defended cigarettes while suppressing evidence of harm through scientific manipulation and regulatory capture.
Breckenridge2016: Keith Breckenridge: Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2016, 9781107434899. A history of how South Africa became a global pioneer in biometric identification in order to implement apartheid.
Bregman2020: Rutger Bregman: Humankind: A Hopeful History (translated by Erica Moore and Elizabeth Manton). Little, Brown, 2020, 9780316418539. Reexamines famous social-science studies—Stanford Prison Experiment, Robbers Cave, the bystander effect—and argues they were methodologically flawed or misrepresented, making a popular case that humans are fundamentally cooperative rather than selfish.
Browne2015: Simone Browne: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015, 9780822359388. Argues that surveillance technologies have always been designed with Black people as primary targets, from slave passes to facial recognition systems.
BuenodeMesquita2011: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith: The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics. PublicAffairs, 2011, 9781610390446. Argues that political leaders of all regime types prioritize keeping a small coalition of key supporters satisfied over serving the general population.
Burke1790: Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. J. Dodsley, 1790. Classic statement of the conservative case for gradual reform, including the argument that society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.

C

Campbell2001: W. Joseph Campbell: Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies. Bloomsbury, 2011, 9780275981136. Debunks the legend that yellow journalism caused the Spanish-American War, while examining how the press shapes and distorts historical memory.
Case2021: Anne Case and Angus Deaton: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton Universitiy Press, 2021, 9780691217079. Looks at deaths from suicide and substance abuse among working-class Americans, and at the social and economic forces that are causing them.
Cassidy2025: John Cassidy: Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025, 9780241457009. A history of the critics of capitalism from Luddites to present-day AI skeptics.
Cech2021: Erin Cech: The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality. University of California Press, 2021, 9780520303232. Shows how the ideology of “following your passion” in work intensifies labor exploitation and concentrates opportunity among already-privileged groups.
Chang2012: Ha-Joon Chang: 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Bloomsbury, 2012, 9781608193387. An accessible refutation of twenty-three standard free-market claims about capitalism, drawing on economic history to show the gap between theory and practice.
Charrad2001: Mounira M. Charrad: States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. University of California Press, 2001, 9780520225763. Arguing that state-building dynamics rather than feminist pressure drove Tunisia’s changes to family law in the 1950s.
Chenoweth2011: Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan: Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Columbia University Press, 2011, 9780231156820. An empirical study showing nonviolent civil resistance campaigns succeed roughly twice as often as violent ones in achieving political goals.
Chouldechova2017: Alexandra Chouldechova: “Fair Prediction with Disparate Impact: A Study of Bias in Recidivism Prediction Instruments”. Big Data, 5(2), 2017, 10.1089/big.2016.0047. Mathematical proof that commonly used fairness criteria for recidivism prediction algorithms are mutually incompatible when base rates differ across groups.
Cole2002: Simon A. Cole: Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Harvard University Press, 2002, 9780674010024. A history of fingerprinting from its origins in colonial India through its adoption by police worldwide.
Conquest1986: Robert Conquest: The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press, 1986, 9780195051803. A history of Stalin’s forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the early 1930s and the resulting famine that killed millions, particularly in Ukraine.
Cottom2017: Tressie McMillan Cottom: Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. The New Press, 2017, 9781620970607. Describes how for-profit colleges exploit credential-seeking among low-income and minority students, leaving them with debt and worthless degrees.
Crick2000: Bernard Crick: In Defence of Politics (5th ed.). Continuum, 2000 (original 1962), 9780826450654. A classic defense of politics, understood as the negotiation of competing interests, against ideologies that promise to transcend it through technocracy or purity.

D

Dallaire2005: Roméo Dallaire with Brent Beardsley: Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Carroll & Graf, 2005, 9780786715107. Memoir by the UN force commander in Rwanda who witnessed the 1994 genocide and was prevented from intervening to stop it by the international community.
Daniel1972: Pete Daniel: The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. University of Illinois Press, 1972, 9780252061462. History of peonage in the American South after Reconstruction, documenting how debt bondage re-created conditions of virtual slavery for Black and poor white workers.
Davies2022: Dan Davies: Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World. Scribner, 2022, 9781982114930. Explains the mechanics of financial fraud by showing the structural features of markets that make them possible.
Devries2008: Jan de Vries: The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2008, 9780521719254. Argues that the shift toward market-oriented household labor preceded and enabled the Industrial Revolution, reframing who drove early economic growth.
Doctorow2022: Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin: Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back. Beacon Press, 2022, 9780807007068. Examines how power concentrated in media and technology allows corporations to lock in both creators and consumers.
Doctorow2025: Cory Doctorow: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025, 9780374619329. Diagnoses the systematic degradation of digital platforms from useful services into exploitative traps, and argues for structural reforms to reverse it.
Douglas2002: Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 2002 (original 1966), 9780415289955. Anthropological analysis of how all societies use categories of purity and pollution to enforce social boundaries and mark outsiders as dangerous.
Dowbiggin2007: Ian Dowbiggin: A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine. Bloomsbury, 2007, 9780742531116. A history of euthanasia debates in Western societies, tracing how medical, religious, and political arguments have shifted over a century and a half.
Dreze2013: Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen: An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions. Princeton University Press, 2013, 9780691160795. Examines India’s economic development failures, arguing that growth has not translated into adequate improvements in health, education, or equality.
Dudley2022: Renée Dudley and Daniel Golden: The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits’ Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, 9780374603304. An account of a volunteer team of malware analysts who hunt ransomware gangs, exposing the criminal infrastructure behind a billion-dollar extortion industry.
Dutton2013: Kevin Dutton: The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, 9780374533984. Argues that psychopathic traits are not uniformly harmful and can confer advantages in professions requiring high-stakes decision-making.

E

Eco1995: Umberto Eco: “Ur-Fascism.” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995. Identifies recurring features of fascist ideology that can combine in varied forms.
Ehmke2025: Coraline Ada Ehmke: We Just Build Hammers: Stories from the Past, Present, and Future of Responsible Tech. Apress, 2025, 9798868812484. Collection of stories and analysis about how technologists have confronted the harmful uses of their work and what responsible practice might look like.
Epstein2007: Helen Epstein: The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, 9780374281526. Examines Uganda’s successful early response to the HIV epidemic, arguing that community-based open discussion—rather than external resources—drove the decline in prevalence.
Eubanks2018: Virginia Eubanks: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St. Martin’s Press, 2018, 9781250074317. Documents how automated decision systems in welfare, child protection, and criminal justice systematically harm poor and working-class Americans.
Ewing2017: Jack Ewing: Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal. W. W. Norton, 2017, 9780393254501. Describes how Volkswagen spent a decade systematically cheating on emissions tests, and how a culture of hierarchical pressure made the fraud possible.

F

Faderman2015: Lillian Faderman: The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. Simon & Schuster, 2015, 9781451694123. Comprehensive history of the American gay rights movement from the 1950s through marriage equality, told through the lives of its activists and adversaries.
Federici2004: Silvia Federici: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004, 9781570270598. Argues that the early modern witch trials were a way to discipline female labor and enclosing women’s reproductive work inside unpaid domestic roles.
Ferguson2015: Christopher J. Ferguson: “Do Angry Birds Make for Angry Children? A Meta-Analysis of Video Game Influences on Children’s and Adolescents’ Aggression, Mental Health, Prosocial Behavior, and Academic Performance.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 2015, 10.1177/1745691615592234. Meta-analysis of research on violent video games finding minimal evidence that they cause aggression, identifying methodological flaws in studies claiming otherwise.
FitzPatrick2020: Robert L. FitzPatrick: Ponzinomics: The Untold Story of Multi-Level Marketing. Pyramid Scheme Alert Press, 2020, 9780970975430. A detailed exposé of the multi-level marketing industry’s structural similarities to pyramid schemes and the financial harm it inflicts on most participants.
Folbre2001: Nancy Folbre: The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. The New Press, 2001, 9781565846555. Shows how unpaid care work sustains the entire economy while remaining systematically excluded from economic measurement and theory.
Frank1985: Robert H. Frank: Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status. Oxford University Press, 1985, 9780195049459. Argues that humans care about relative status within local reference groups more than absolute wealth, explaining many economically “irrational” behaviors.
Frankfurt2005: Harry G. Frankfurt: On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005, 9780691122946. A philosophical analysis distinguishing bullshit (indifference to truth) from lying.
Frenkel2021: Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang: An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. Harper, 2021, 9780062960672. Describes Facebook’s decade of prioritizing growth and engagement over addressing its platform’s role in misinformation and political manipulation.
Freudenberg2011: William R. Freudenburg and Robert Gramling: Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America. MIT Press, 2011, 9780262015837. An analysis of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster as the predictable result of regulatory capture, industry self-governance, and systematic suppression of safety concerns.
Funder2011: Anna Funder: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. Harper Collins, 2011 (original 2002), 9780062077325. Oral histories from East Germans who lived under Stasi surveillance, revealing the devastation wrought by a state security apparatus that infected every relationship.

G

Galbraith1954: John Kenneth Galbraith: The Great Crash 1929. Houghton Mifflin, 1954, 9780395859995. Classic account of the speculative bubble and crash of 1929, examining the psychological, institutional, and regulatory failures that produced it.
Galbraith1998: John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society. Houghton Mifflin, 1998 (original 1958), 9780395925003. Argued that postwar American prosperity masked a dangerous imbalance: abundance of private goods alongside systematic neglect of public ones.
Galinsky2001: Adam D. Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler: “First Offers as Anchors: The Role of Perspective-Taking and Negotiator Focus.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(4), 2001, 10.1037/0022-3514.81.4.657. Demonstrates that making the first offer in a negotiation anchors the outcome in the first mover’s favor.
GartonAsh2016: Timothy Garton Ash: Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. Yale University Press, 2016, 9780300226942. Proposes principles for governing free speech in a globally connected world, balancing liberal commitments against hate, incitement, and power asymmetries.
Garvin2013: David A. Garvin: “How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management.” Harvard Business Review, December 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management. Describes how Google used internal data to persuade its engineers that management added value, overcoming cultural resistance to hierarchy.
Gawande2009: Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Metropolitan Books, 2009, 9780805091748. Argues that checklists are the most effective tool for reducing catastrophic error in complex high-stakes environments.
Gawande2014: Atul Gawande: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt, 2014, 9780805095159. Describes how American medicine handles aging and death badly, prioritizing intervention over quality of life and dignity in dying.
Giridharadas2018: Anand Giridharadas: Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Knopf, 2018, 9780525533184. Argues that plutocratic philanthropy allows the wealthy to appear to help the world while preserving the economic arrangements that make help necessary.
Goffman1959: Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor, 1959, 9780385094023. Argues that everyday social interaction is a kind of performance in which people manage impressions to shape how others perceive and treat them.
Gordon2001: Andrew Gordon: The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan. Harvard University Press, 2001, 9780674007062. A history of Japanese labor-management relations from postwar reconstruction through the economic miracle, examining how cooperation was built.
Graeber2011: David Graeber: Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011, 9781933633862. Anthropological history of debt across five thousand years, arguing that the standard economic account of money emerging from barter is a myth.
Graeber2018: David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster, 2018, 9781501143335. Argues that a large fraction of modern employment consists of jobs that even those who hold them consider pointless, and explores why such work proliferates.
Gray2009: Mary L. Gray: Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. NYU Press, 2009, 9780814731932. Examines how rural LGBTQ+ youth use media and internet access to create community and visibility outside urban queer spaces.
Grossman1995: Dave Grossman: On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Little, Brown, 1995, 9780316330114. A military historian’s analysis of the psychological barriers to killing in combat, and how modern training methods systematically overcome them.
Grossman1999: Dave Grossman and Gloria Degaetano: Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence. Crown, 1999, 9780804139359. Argues that violent media, particularly video games, condition children to kill by overcoming the same inhibitions targeted by military training.

H

Hannig2023: Anita Hannig: The Day I Die The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America. Sourcebooks, 2023, 9781728259420. Ethnographic account of the assisted dying debate in America through the stories of patients, families, and practitioners.
Hardin1968: Garrett Hardin: “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science, 162(3859), 1968, 10.1126/science.162.3859.1243. Influential but deeply flawed essay arguing that individuals will inevitably overexploit shared resources, used to justify privatization.
Hari2015: Johann Hari: Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Bloomsbury, 2015, 9781408857823. Shows that the war on drugs was built on racism and prohibition ideology rather than evidence of harm.
Harvey1998: Neil Harvey: The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. Duke University Press, 1998, 9780822322382. History and analysis of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, examining the indigenous communities’ political agency and their construction of autonomous governance structures outside the state.
Hemenway2009: David Hemenway: While We Were Sleeping: Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention. University of California Press, 2009, 9780520258464. Documents successful public health campaigns in injury prevention to identify what makes safety regulation actually work.
HemenwayFalk2026: Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas: “The AI Layoff Trap”. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617, March 2026
Herman1988: Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon, 1988, 9780375714498. Proposes a “propaganda model” of media, arguing that commercial pressures, advertiser dependence, and sourcing from official institutions systematically filter out dissent.
Hilts2003: Philip J. Hilts: Protecting America’s Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation. University of North Carolina Press, 2003, 9780807854716. A history of the FDA as an institution that has repeatedly been captured by the industries it regulates, then periodically reformed after public health disasters.
Hirsch2015: Fred Hirsch: Social Limits to Growth (2nd ed). Routledge, 2015 (original 1977), 9781138834941. Argues that positional goods lose value as more people gain access to them, creating a growth trap.
Hirshman2012: Linda Hirshman: Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. Harper, 2012, 9780061965500. Political history of the American gay rights movement’s legal and legislative strategy.
Hochschild2006: Adam Hochschild: Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves. Mariner Books, 2006, 9780618619078. History of the British abolitionist movement, showing how a small group of dedicated people built the world’s first successful human rights campaign.
HochschildMachung1989: Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung: The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. Viking, 1989, 9780142002926. Describes how women in dual-income American households perform roughly a month of additional unpaid domestic labor per year compared to their partners, and how they rationalize this inequality as personal choice.
Hoffer2010: Eric Hoffer: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Harper Perennial, 2010 (original 1951), 9780060505912. Psychological portrait of mass movement fanatics, arguing that personal frustration and self-hatred drive fanatical commitment.
Hunt2007: Lynn Hunt: Inventing Human Rights: A History. W. W. Norton, 2007, 9780393060959. Argues that the concept of human rights was invented in the eighteenth century through the spread of empathy enabled by the novel as a literary form.

I

Igo2020: Sarah E. Igo: The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America. Harvard University Press, 2020, 9780674244795. History of how American attitudes toward privacy have shifted from the nineteenth century to the present, shaped by census surveys, social science, and surveillance technology.

J

Jaffe2021: Sarah Jaffe: Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Bold Type Books, 2021, 9781568589398. Argues that the ideology of work-as-passion serves employers by inducing workers to accept poor conditions in exchange for the feeling of doing something meaningful.
Jaffrelot2023: Christophe Jaffrelot: Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2021 (original 2019), 9780691247908. Describes how Modi’s government has systematically weakened Indian democratic institutions while mobilizing Hindu nationalist identity politics.
Jenkins1999: Rob Jenkins and Anne Marie Goetz: “Accounts and Accountability: Theoretical Implications of the Right-to-Information Movement in India.” Third World Quarterly, 20(3), 1999, 10.1080/01436599913712. Analysis of the grassroots campaign for the right to information in rural Rajasthan and its implications for democratic accountability and bottom-up legal reform.
Jenkins2024: Tiffany Jenkins: Strangers and Intimates: How the State Took Over Your Most Private Relationships. Bloomsbury, 2024, 9781529034165. Argues that the boundary between public and private life is a political artifact, tracing how states have repeatedly redrawn it—often at the demand of reformers—and what this means for individual freedom and social accountability.
JohnsonKwak2010: Simon Johnson and James Kwak: 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. Pantheon Books, 2010, 9780307379054. Describes how the concentration of Wall Street banks created a financial oligarchy that captured regulatory agencies that led to the 2008 financial crisis.
Jonas1984: Hans Jonas: The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. University of Chicago Press, 1984 (original German 1979), 9780226405971. Argues that modern technology demands a new ethics of responsibility oriented toward the long-run future, because our power to cause irreversible harm has far outgrown our ethical frameworks.

K

Kahneman2011: Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, 9780374533557. Synthesizes decades of behavioral economics research to show that human judgment is systematically distorted by cognitive biases that violate rational-choice theory.
Kaplan2012: David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro: Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld (expanded ed.). University of California Press, 2012 (original 1986), 9780520269064. A comprehensive history of the Yakuza, examining their structure, social functions, political connections, and decline.
Karabel2006: Jerome Karabel: The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Mariner Books, 2006, 9780618773558. Describes how Harvard, Yale, and Princeton used admissions criteria ostensibly about merit to exclude Jews and maintain the dominance of Protestant elites through the twentieth century.
Keefe2021: Patrick Radden Keefe: Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. Doubleday, 2021, 9780385545686. Investigative history of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, showing how they created and sustained the opioid epidemic while insulating themselves from accountability.
Kelly2012: Marjorie Kelly: Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution. Berrett-Koehler, 2012, 9781605093109. Argues that a revolution in ownership forms—including worker cooperatives, community land trusts, and public banks—is already underway and could replace the shareholder corporation.
Kelly2022: Kim Kelly: Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor. One Signal, 2022, 9781982171063. A history of organized labor in the US, told through the stories of workers and organizers across industries.
Kendi2016: Ibram X. Kendi: Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Nation Books, 2016, 9781568584638. A history of racist ideas in American intellectual and political life, arguing that racism is not ignorance but a post-hoc justification for policies serving elite interests.
Keynes1930: John Maynard Keynes: “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion. Macmillan, 1931. An essay predicting that technological productivity would reduce the workweek to fifteen hours within a century.
Khan2017: Lina Khan: “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” Yale Law Journal, 126(3), 2017. A legal argument that antitrust doctrine has failed to address Amazon’s anti-competitive behavior because it focuses only on consumer prices, ignoring market power.
Khera2019: Reetika Khera (ed.): Dissent on Aadhaar: Big Data Meets Big Brother. Orient BlackSwan, 2019, 9789352875429. A collection of critical essays on India’s Aadhaar biometric identity system, examining its governance failures, exclusions, and surveillance.
Kindleberger2005: Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Aliber: Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (5th ed.). Wiley, 2005 (original 1978), 9780471467144. A classic analysis of financial crises from the seventeenth century to the late twentieth.
Kohn1999: Linda T. Kohn, Janet M. Corrigan, and Molla S. Donaldson (eds.): To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System. National Academies Press, 2000, 9780309068376. A landmark report documenting that medical errors kill tens of thousands of Americans annually, calling for a systemic safety approach rather than individual blame.

L

Lakey2018: George Lakey: How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning. Melville House, 2018, 9781612197531. A practical handbook for nonviolent direct action campaigns, drawing on historical examples to identify effective strategies and organizational structures.
Lapierre2002: Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro: Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster. Grand Central Publishing, 2002, 9780446530880. Describes the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster—the worst industrial accident in history—and the corporate decisions that led to it.
LevitskyZiblatt2018: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018, 9781524762940. Argues that contemporary democracies are more likely to erode through legal and electoral means—packing courts, manipulating elections, weakening norms—than through military coups.
Lewis2010: Michael Lewis: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. W. W. Norton, 2010, 9780393338829. The story of the traders and analysts who bet on the 2008 mortgage collapse.
Lewy2011: Guenter Lewy: Assisted Death in Europe and America: Four Regimes and Their Lessons. Oxford University Press, 2011, 9780199746415. Comparative analysis of assisted dying policy in the Netherlands, Belgium, Oregon, and Switzerland.
Lindsey1942: Almont Lindsey: The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval. University of Chicago Press, 1942. Describes the 1894 Pullman Strike, in which Pullman’s company town became the site of a nationwide railroad boycott and federal intervention.
Linebaugh2014: Peter Linebaugh: Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance. PM Press, 2014, 9781604867473. Essays arguing that the historical enclosure of common lands was not inevitable economic progress but a deliberate dispossession, and tracing resistance to it.
Linklater2015: Andro Linklater: Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership. Bloomsbury, 2015, 9781620402917. Global history of land ownership, arguing that private property in land has been the central driver of economic and political history.

M

Macaskill2023: William MacAskill: What We Owe the Future. Basic Books, 2023, 9781541604032. Argues that future people matter morally as much as present ones, and that improving the long-run trajectory of civilization should be a central ethical priority—a position called longtermism.
Macintyre2020: Stuart Macintyre: A Concise History of Australia (5th ed.). Cambridge University Press, 2020, 9781108728485. Concise history of Australia from indigenous settlement through the present, examining colonization, federation, immigration, and the evolution of national identity.
Mackay1841: Charles Mackay: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Richard Bentley, 1841. Classic description of episodes of collective folly, including the Dutch tulip mania and South Sea Bubble.
Markey2017: Patrick M. Markey and Christopher J. Ferguson: Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong. BenBella, 2017, 9781942952992. Argues that the moral panic over violent video games was manufactured by politicians and activists and is unsupported by decades of research.
Mashaw1990: Jerry L. Mashaw and David L. Harfst: The Struggle for Auto Safety. Harvard University Press, 1990, 9780674845305. Study of how the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was systematically weakened by industry lobbying, showing how regulatory capture works in practice.
Mayer2016: Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, 2016, 9780385535595. Investigates how a network of ultra-wealthy donors, led by Charles and David Koch, built a shadow political infrastructure of think tanks, academic programs, and dark-money groups to reshape American policy in their favor.
Mazer1998: Sharon Mazer: Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle. University Press of Mississippi, 1998, 9781578060566. Academic analysis of professional wrestling as a form of popular culture.
Mazzucato2013: Mariana Mazzucato: The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. PublicAffairs, 2015, 9781610396134. Argues that the state, not private enterprise, has been the primary source of transformative technological innovation, and that public investment deserves public reward.
McGhee2021: Heather McGhee: The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. One World, 2021, 9780525509561. Argues that zero-sum racial thinking has led to policies that damaged white working-class Americans alongside Black ones, and that building solidarity across racial lines serves the interests of most Americans.
McGrann2026: Owen McGrann: “The Dead Economy Theory.” Bitter Buffaloes, May 1, 2026, https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory. Argues that AI-driven mass labor replacement creates a structural prisoners’ dilemma in which each firm rationally automates beyond the socially optimal level, destroying the consumer base on which all firms depend.
McIntosh1989: Peggy McIntosh: “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Peace and Freedom, July/August 1989. An essay describing how racial and other privileges operate as an invisible set of unearned assets, invisible precisely because those who hold them have never had to notice their absence.
McLeay2014: Michael McLeay, Amar Radia, and Ryland Thomas: “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2014 Q1, https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy. The Bank of England’s explanation of how commercial banks create money through lending rather than lending out pre-existing deposits.
Michaels2008: David Michaels: Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. Oxford University Press, 2008, 9780195300673. Documents the tobacco industry’s strategy of manufacturing scientific doubt, showing how it was adopted by other industries to delay regulation of harmful products.
Milgram1974: Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row, 1974, 9780061312946. Reports on the famous experiments showing that ordinary people will commit immoral acts when instructed to by authority figures.
Morrison1991: Roy Morrison: We Build the Road as We Travel: Mondragón, a Cooperative Social System. New Society Publishers, 1991, 9780865712546. Detailed account of the Mondragón cooperative network in the Basque Country.
Moyn2010: Samuel Moyn: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Harvard University Press, 2010, 9780674048720. Argues that human rights became a global political movement because other utopian visions had failed.
Mullainathan2013: Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir: Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books/Henry Holt, 2013, 9780805092646. Argues that scarcity of money, time, or social capital imposes a measurable cognitive load that depletes the mental bandwidth available for complex decision-making, with systematic consequences for how poor people navigate institutions.

N

Nader1965: Ralph Nader: Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. Grossman Publishers, 1965. A classic exposé of systematic safety defects in American automobiles that launched the consumer safety movement.
Nasaw2000: David Nasaw: The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 9780618154463. Biography of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, examining how his personal ambition and commercial interests shaped American journalism and politics.
Nixon2011: Rob Nixon: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011, 9780674049307. Argues that environmental harm inflicted on poor and indigenous communities is largely invisible to the media because it unfolds slowly rather than catastrophically.
Nutt2012: David Nutt: Drugs Without the Hot Air: Making Sense of the Drug Debate. Bloomsbury, 2012, 9781906860165. Evidence-based analysis of legal and illegal drugs by a former UK government chief drug adviser, arguing that policy is systematically disconnected from evidence of harm.

O

Oluo2018: Ijeoma Oluo: So You Want to Talk About Race. Basic Books, 2018, 9781580056786. An accessible guide to conversations about race in the US, centered around racism as a system rather than individual prejudice.
Omi2015: Michael Omi and Howard Winant: Racial Formation in the United States (3rd ed.). Routledge, 2015 (original 1986), 9780415520317. Introduces racial formation theory: the argument that race is an unstable social and political construct continuously remade through institutional and everyday practices.
Oneil2016: Cathy O’Neil: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown, 2016, 9780553418811. Documents how algorithmic models in education, criminal justice, and finance systematically discriminate against the poor while appearing objective.
Orenstein2020: Peggy Orenstein: Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Loneliness, Vulnerability, and the Search for Something Real. Harper, 2020, 9780062666987. An investigation of how young men navigate sexuality, pornography, and consent.
Oreskes2010: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change. Bloomsbury, 2010, 9781608193943. Documents how a small network of scientists participated in a decades-long campaign to sow doubt about tobacco, climate change, acid rain, and other threats.
Orleck1995: Annelise Orleck: Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965. University of North Carolina Press, 1995, 9780807844977. A history of the immigrant Jewish women workers in early twentieth-century New York who built the labor movement and redefined working-class political culture.
Ostrom2015: Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 2015 (original 1990), 9781107569782. Research showing that communities can successfully govern shared resources without privatization or state control, refuting the tragedy-of-the-commons argument.

P

Paasonen2011: Susanna Paasonen: Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. MIT Press, 2011, 9780262551274. An academic analysis of online pornography, examining its effects on viewers.
Packard2007: Vance Packard: The Hidden Persuaders. Ig Publishing, 2007 (original 1957), 9780978843106.. 1957 exposé of the advertising and public relations industries’ use of hidden psychological techniques to manipulate consumer behavior and political opinion.
Palazzo2025: Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage: The Dark Pattern: The Hidden Dynamics of Corporate Scandals. PublicAffairs, 2025, 9781541705302. Analysis of corporate scandals, identifying the organizational and psychological dynamics that normalizes unethical behavior.
Parfit1987: Derek Parfit: Reasons and Persons. Clarendon Press, 1987, 9780198249085. Wide-ranging work in moral philosophy; Part IV introduces the non-identity problem, which challenges standard accounts of obligations to future generations.
Parson2003: Edward A. Parson: Protecting the Ozone Layer: Science and Strategy. Oxford University Press, 2003, 9780195155143. A detailed history of the scientific, diplomatic, and economic processes that produced the Montreal Protocol and successfully addressed the ozone hole.
Pasquale2015: Frank Pasquale: The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Harvard University Press, 2015, 9780674368279. Argues that financial and information industries use proprietary algorithms to make consequential decisions while remaining unaccountable to those they affect.
Patel2017: Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. University of California Press, 2017, 9780520299931. Argues that capitalism has been built by making nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives artificially cheap in order to transfer costs onto the powerless.
Paxton2004: Robert O. Paxton: The Anatomy of Fascism. Knopf, 2004, 9781400040940. Identifies core features of fascism through comparative historical analysis of its rise and exercise of power in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany.
Peiss2011: Kathy Peiss: Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011 (original 1998), 9780812221404. A critical history of the American beauty industry.
PerezTruglia2020: Ricardo Perez-Truglia: “The Effects of Income Transparency on Well-Being: Evidence from a Natural Experiment.” American Economic Review, 110(4), 2020, 10.1257/aer.20160256. Describes a natural experiment using Norway’s public tax records showing that people’s well-being is more affected by how their income compares to neighbors than its absolute level.
Perrow1999: Charles Perrow: Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Princeton University Press, 1999 (original 1984), 9780691004129. Argues that catastrophic accidents in complex, tightly coupled systems are not aberrations but normal and inevitable outcomes.
Pfeffer1992: Jeffrey Pfeffer: Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations. Harvard Business Press, 1992, 9780875844404. Argues that organizational success depends on understanding and exercising power, and that managers who ignore politics systematically lose to those who don’t.
Phillips2019: Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski: The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. Verso, 2019, 9781786635167. Argues that giant corporations like Walmart already engage in complex central planning, undermining the claim that it is inherently inefficient.
Piketty2017: Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press, 2017 (original 2013), 9780674979857. Argues that wealth inequality tends to grow over time because the return on capital consistently outpaces economic growth, concentrating ownership among the already-wealthy unless deliberately checked by policy interventions like progressive taxation.
Popper2011: Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge, 2011 (original 1945), 9780415610216. A classic philosophical critique of totalitarianism.

Q

Quarantelli1998: E.L. Quarantelli (ed.): What Is a Disaster?: A Dozen Perspectives on the Question. Routledge, 1998, 9780415178990. A collection of essays from disaster researchers examining what makes an event a disaster, showing how the concept is contested across disciplines.

R

Rawls1999: John Rawls: A Theory of Justice (2nd ed.). Harvard University Press, 1999 (original 1971), 9780674000780. Foundational work in political philosophy; the “just savings principle” addresses obligations across generations, arguing that each generation must preserve the gains of culture and justice and maintain just institutions.
Reich2018: Rob Reich: Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. Princeton University Press, 2018, 9780691183497. Argues that philanthropy by the wealthy is anti-democratic, allowing rich individuals to direct public priorities without public accountability.
Rivera2015: Lauren A. Rivera: Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton University Press, 2015, 9780691155623. An ethnographic study of how elite professional firms hire, finding they select for cultural fit with the upper class rather than actual merit.
Roan1989: Sharon L. Roan: Ozone Crisis: The 15-Year Evolution of a Sudden Global Emergency. Wiley, 1989, 9780471522720. A history of the discovery of the ozone hole and the political and scientific debates that preceded the Montreal Protocol.
Robin2018: Corey Robin: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Oxford University Press, 2018, 9780190692001. Argues that conservatism is not about tradition or stability but about preserving hierarchies of power against challenges from below.
Roediger1989: David R. Roediger and Philip S. Foner: Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day. Greenwood Press, 1989, 9780313261206. A history of the American labor movement’s century-long campaign for the eight-hour working day, showing how it redefined citizenship and the meaning of labor.
Runciman2014: David Runciman: Politics. Profile Books, 2014, 9781846685989. A short, accessible introduction to what politics is, why it matters, and why its messiness is preferable to the alternatives.
Russell2014: Andrew L. Russell: Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology and Networks. Cambridge University Press, 2014, 9781107612044. Explores how technical standards in telecommunications came to be, and the tension between open and proprietary approaches.

S

Sandel2020: Michael J. Sandel: The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, 9780374289980. Argues that the ideology of meritocracy is both false and corrosive, breeding hubris among winners and humiliation among losers while obscuring structural inequality.
Sapp2026: Keyana Sapp: “Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose.” Worse on Purpose, March 23, 2026, https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-backpack-got-worse-on-purpose. Traces how VF Corporation acquired the majority of the US backpack market and systematically degraded product quality across its brands while using warranty language designed to exclude the failure modes it engineered.
Savedoff2012: William D. Savedoff, David de Ferranti, Amy L. Smith, and Victoria Fan: “Political and Economic Aspects of the Transition to Universal Health Coverage.” The Lancet, 380(9845), 2012, 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)61083-6. Comparative analysis of the political economy of transitions to universal health coverage, covering Thailand, Mexico, and other middle-income countries that achieved coverage under political opposition.
Schlosser2001: Eric Schlosser: Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Houghton Mifflin, 2001, 9780395977897. A critical investigation of the American fast food industry.
Schneier2023: Bruce Schneier: A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back. WW Norton, 2023, 9780393866667. Argues that the rich and powerful hack laws, regulations, and markets in ways that are similar to computer hacking.
Scott1998: James C. Scott: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998, 9780300078152. Argues that large-scale state projects to improve society fail when they ignore local knowledge.
Segrave1994: Kerry Segrave: Payola in the Music Industry: A History, 1880-1991. McFarland, 2013, 9780786476145. A history of payola in the music industry from the nineteenth century to the 1990s.
Shapiro1999: Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian: Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Harvard Business School Press, 1999, 9780875848631. A guide to the economics of information goods, describing lock-in, switching costs, and network effects as the key dynamics of the information economy.
Shaxson2011: Nicholas Shaxson: Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens. St. Martin’s, 2012, 9780230341722. An investigation of offshore tax havens, showing how they enable corporations and wealthy individuals to pay less than most citizens.
Shiller2015: Robert J. Shiller: Irrational Exuberance (3rd ed.). Princeton University Press, 2015 (original 2000), 9780691166261. Argues that stock and real estate markets are driven by narrative and social dynamics, creating cycles of irrational valuation.
Shortland2019: Anja Shortland: Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business. Oxford University Press, 2019, 9780198815471. Economic analysis of the kidnap-for-ransom industry, showing that it operates according to surprisingly stable rules and that ransom insurance creates perverse incentives.
Silver2003: Beverly J. Silver: Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 9780521520775. Examines how labor movements have arisen in response to capital mobility and technological change.
Singer1981: Peter Singer: The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Argues that the circle of moral concern has expanded historically and should eventually encompass all sentient beings.
Singer2023: Jessie Singer: There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster. Simon & Schuster, 2023, 9781982129668. Argues that accidents are not random misfortune but the predictable results of choices by powerful institutions, and that the “accident” framing obscures accountability.
Skarbek2014: David Skarbek: The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System. Oxford University Press, 2014, 9780199328499. Argues that American prison gangs emerged as governance institutions filling the vacuum left by inadequate official oversight of the incarcerated.
Snowden2020: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record. Henry Holt and Company, 2020, 9781250772909.
Solnit2009: Rebecca Solnit: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Viking, 2009, 9780670021079. Presents case studies of disasters from San Francisco 1906 to Katrina to show that communities respond to catastrophe with mutual aid and solidarity rather than panic.
Southern1990: R.W. Southern: Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (2nd ed.). Penguin, 1990 (original 1970), 9780140137552. Classic history of the medieval Western church.
Spufford2012: Francis Spufford: Red Plenty. Graywolf Press, 2012, 9781555976040. A partly fictional account of the Soviet Union’s attempt to build a planned economy in the 1950s and why it ultimately failed.
Srnicek2016: Nick Srnicek: Platform Capitalism. Polity Press, 2016, 9781509504862. Analyzes digital platforms as a new capitalist form, in which data extraction and network effects replace traditional models of production and profit.
SteinLubrano2024: Alexis Stein Lubrano: Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st Century Minds. Bloomsbury Continuum, 2025, 9781399413923. Argues that evidence-based persuasion techniques are more effective than fact-dumping at changing minds.
Stigler1971: George J. Stigler: “The Theory of Economic Regulation.” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 2(1), 1971, 10.2307/3003160. Influential economic theory arguing that regulatory agencies are systematically captured by the industries they regulate because those industries have concentrated incentives to do so.
Stoller2019: Matt Stoller: Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Simon & Schuster, 2019, 9781501183089. A history of the American antitrust movement, arguing that its recent abandonment has allowed monopoly power to distort politics and the economy.
Studwell2013: Joe Studwell: How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region. Grove Press, 2013, 9780802121431. A comparative analysis of East Asian economies showing that land reform and industrial policy, not free markets, drove their economic growth.
Suzman2021: James Suzman: Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time. Penguin Press, 2021, 9780525561750. Anthropological sweep from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers through the industrial present, arguing that scarcity-driven overwork is a recent and historically unusual arrangement—most of our ancestors worked far less and valued leisure more.

T

Tarrant2016: Shira Tarrant: The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press, 2016, 9780190205140. Accessible overview of the pornography industry’s economics, legal history, labor conditions, and public health debates.
Thaler2009: Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin, 2009, 9780143115267. Argues that choice environments can be designed to nudge people toward better decisions.
Thelen1992: Kathleen Thelen: Union of Parts: Labor Politics in Postwar Germany. Cornell University Press, 1991, 9780801425868. Comparative study of labor politics in West Germany showing how postwar industrial relations were constructed through political choices rather than economic necessity.
Thiel2014: Peter Thiel and Blake Masters: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Crown Business, 2014, 9780804139298. A Silicon Valley technofascist’s argument that startups should try to create monopolies, and that competition is for losers.
Thompson1963: E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class. Knopf, 1966, 9780394703220. Classic history arguing that the English working class was not a product of industrial conditions but actively made itself through culture and politics.
Tierney2006: Kathleen Tierney, Christine Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski: “Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths, Media Frames, and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 604, 2006, 10.1177/0002716205285589. Shows how media coverage of Hurricane Katrina deployed myths of looting and social breakdown that contradicted evidence and guided disastrously wrong government responses.
Torpey2000: John Torpey: The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge University Press, 2000, 9780521634939. A history of how the passport was invented by states as a tool for controlling population movement.
TorresGebru2024: Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru: “TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence.” First Monday, 29(4), 2024, 10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636. Argues that the ideological cluster underlying effective altruism and longtermism draws on transhumanist and eugenic traditions with harmful implications for present-day AI policy.
Tripp2015: Aili Mari Tripp: Women and Power in Postconflict Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2015, 9781107535879. Examines how women in post-conflict African societies achieved greater political representation than women in countries that did not experience civil conflict.

U

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Vaughan1996: Diane Vaughan: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. University of Chicago Press, 1996, 9780226851754. A study of the Challenger disaster that shows it resulted not from aberrant behavior but from the gradual institutionalization of acceptable risk.
Veblen1899: Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class. Macmillan, 1899. Classic sociological argument that conspicuous consumption drives much of economic behavior in wealthy societies.

W

Wainwright2017: Tom Wainwright: Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel. PublicAffairs, 2017, 9781610397704. Applies business analysis to drug cartels, showing that their strategies, challenges, and vulnerabilities mirror those of legitimate corporations operating under extreme conditions.
Walder2017: Andrew G. Walder: China Under Mao A Revolution Derailed. Harvard University Press, 2017, 9780674975491. A historical analysis of revolutionary violence in Mao’s China.
Waldron2012: Jeremy Waldron: The Harm in Hate Speech. Harvard University Press, 2014, 9780674416864. Argues that hate speech causes a distinctive harm—the denial of civic dignity—that justifies legal restriction.
Waring1988: Marilyn Waring: If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. Harper & Row, 1988, 9780062509338. Exposes how the UN System of National Accounts deliberately excludes unpaid domestic and care labor from GDP, with concrete economic consequences for women’s pensions, credit access, and political standing.
Webber2011: Jeffery R. Webber: From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Politics of Evo Morales. Haymarket Books, 2011, 9781608461066. Analysis of Bolivia’s social movements and the Morales government’s 2006 nationalization of natural gas resources, examining how redirected revenues reduced poverty by more than half over the following decade.
Wertham1954: Fredric Wertham: Seduction of the Innocent. Rinehart, 1954. Argued that comic books caused juvenile delinquency and desensitized children to violence, leading directly to congressional hearings and the Comics Code Authority, a self-regulatory body that effectively gutted the medium for a generation.
Whitfield2011: Lindsay Whitfield (ed.): The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors. Oxford University Press, 2011, 9780199560172. Comparative analysis of how African governments negotiated with donors.
Whitman2017: James Q. Whitman: Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton University Press, 2017, 9780691172422. Documents how Nazi jurists in 1934 explicitly studied American Jim Crow and immigration statutes as models for the Nuremberg race laws, showing that they sometimes rejected American practices as too harsh rather than too lenient.
Whyte1991: William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte: Making Mondragón: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex. Cornell University Press, 1991, 9780875461823. A detailed study of the Mondragón cooperatives.
Wilhoit2018: Frank Wilhoit: Comment on “Liberals Against Progressives.” Crooked Timber, March 21, 2018. https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288. A comment that went viral, defining conservatism as a system in which the law protects in-groups from out-groups while binding only the out-groups.
Wilkerson2020: Isabel Wilkerson: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House, 2020, 9780593230251. Argues that American racial hierarchy is best understood not as racism but as a caste system.
Wilkinson2011: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury Press, 2011, 9781608193417. Cross-national empirical study showing that greater economic inequality correlates with worse outcomes on virtually every social indicator, from health to violence.
Winkler2011: Adam Winkler: Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. W.W. Norton, 2013, 9780393345834. A legal history of the US Second Amendment showing that gun rights have always been contested and that the current individual right interpretation is historically novel.
Woodford2012: Michael Woodford: Exposure: Inside the Olympus Scandal: How I Went from CEO to Whistleblower. Portfolio/Penguin, 2012, 9781591846888. First-hand account by the Olympus CEO who uncovered a $1.7 billion fraud and was fired for reporting it.
Wright2013: Lawrence Wright: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. Knopf, 2013, 9780307700667. Investigative account of Scientology’s origins, doctrines, and internal culture.
Wu2010: Tim Wu: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Knopf, 2011, 9780307390998. History of successive information industries that shows a recurring cycle from open innovation to monopoly to disruption.
Wu2016: Tim Wu: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Random House, 2016, 9780385352017. A history of the advertising industry’s colonization of human attention.

X

Y

Young1958: Michael Young: The Rise of the Meritocracy. Thames and Hudson, 1958. A satirical novel that coined the term “meritocracy”.
Young2024: Kevin A. Young: Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons From Movements That Won. PM Press, 2024, 9798887440330. A comparative history of successful campaigns to abolish or curtail harmful industries that argues real change only comes when economic pressure is applied on business.
Yunus2007: Muhammad Yunus: Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2007, 9781586484934. Describes the Grameen Bank’s model of lending to poor women through social accountability rather than collateral.

Z

Zucman2015: Gabriel Zucman: The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens. University of Chicago Press, 2015, 9780226422640. Economic analysis of offshore tax evasion.

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