What follows is a list of readings from past meetings, in the approximate order in which they were read. People may be interested to see the history. However, most of these readings have not been read by most of our current participants. So if there is sufficient interest, we can either reread a former selection, or perhaps read excerpts from former readings.
Unless otherwise noted, if a work is referenced below, we read it all.
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Selections from Aristotle’s Politics.
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principal of Population.
David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World.
Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital.
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
John Cassidy, How Markets Fail.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origins of Inequality.
Henry George, Progress and Poverty.
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom.
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom
Marx and Engles, The Communist Manifesto
Robert J. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth.
Joseph Stieglitz, The Price of Inequality.
Thorstein Veblin, Theory of the Leisure Class.
Michael Spence, The Next Convergence.
Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man.
Long Break
Matt Stoller, How Democrats Lost Their Populist Souls from The Atlantic, 2016.
Two papers by the labor economist Richard B. Freeman: The New Global Labor Market, and Why Do We Work More than Keynes Expected, as well as the older essay by Keynes referenced in the second Freeman essay, Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren.
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom.
Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers. (We read it again, largely for the benefit of new participants.)
Two articles from recent issues of The Economist; From Hospitality to Hipsterism, August 8, 2020, and Starting Over Again, July 25, 2020.
Four essays put out by the Brookings Institution entitled Why Are Interest Rates So Low, Parts One through Four by Ben Bernanke, published in 2015. Here are the links: Part One Part Two Part Three; and Part Four.
Covid interruption
Mis-measuring Our Lives by Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi.
Erik S. Reinert’s article The Role of the State in Economic Growth. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227429607_The_role_of_the_state_in_economic_growth .
Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.
Selections from Modern Monetary Theory and its Critics edited by Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan, along with the essay The Weakness of Modern Monetary Theory by Jonathan Hartley.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Part II, Can Capitalism Survive.
Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.
Zephyr Teachout, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.