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Diane Coyle's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Diane Coyle recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Diane Coyle's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
An eminent sociologist and bestselling author offers an inspiring blueprint for rebuilding our fractured society.

We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn't seen since the Civil War. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together, to find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done?

In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleThis is about what social scientists call ‘social capital’, so the social assets or strengths that any community has to draw on in delivering economic improvements or quality of life etc. It’s about libraries in particular, but also other social infrastructure that enables people to meet and understand each other and have safe and inviting ways to help each other. He talks about how these are... (Source)

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2
To understand how humans react and adapt to economic change we need to study people who live in harsh environments. From war zones, natural disasters and failed states, to aging societies and the challenges of technological advancement, every life in this book has been hit by a seismic shock, violently broken or changed in some way.

People living in these odd and marginal places are ignored by number crunching economists and political pollsters alike. Science suggests this is a mistake. This book tells the personal stories of humans living in extreme situations, and of the...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleThis book is a series of rip-roaring tales about what you might classify as ‘informal’ economies in different contexts and the way that some of them work really well and some of them work really badly. The compare and contrast gives you real insights into what perhaps makes a formal, official economy work very well or very badly. (Source)

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3
How the history of technological revolutions can help us better understand economic and political polarization in the age of automation

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members. As Carl Benedikt Frey shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long run, but the immediate consequences of mechanization were...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleCarl’s work is about what the impact of this new wave of technology and automation is going to be on everybody’s jobs and standards of living. He does that by taking a historical perspective and looking at the Industrial Revolution. The fact is that for quite a long period there wasn’t any increase in average standards of living and indeed, as we know from literature, there was a period of great... (Source)

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4

Matchmakers

The New Economics of Multisided Platforms

Many of the most dynamic public companies, from Alibaba to Facebook to Visa, and the most valuable start-ups, such as Airbnb and Uber, are matchmakers that connect one group of customers with another group of customers. Economists call matchmakers multisided platforms because they provide physical or virtual platforms for multiple groups to get together. Dating sites connect people with potential matches, for example, and ride-sharing apps do the same for drivers and riders. Although matchmakers have been around for millennia, they’re becoming more and more popular—and profitable—due... more
Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleBy platforms we mean things like Uber and AirBnB. But there are lots of other examples emerging as well. It’s becoming a very popular business model to try. (Source)

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5
How do the one percent hold on to their wealth? And how do they keep getting richer, despite financial crises and the myriad of taxes on income, capital gains, and inheritance? Capital without Borders takes a novel approach to these questions by looking at professionals who specialize in protecting the fortunes of the world's richest people: wealth managers. Brooke Harrington spent nearly eight years studying this little-known group--including two years training to become a wealth manager herself. She then "followed the money" to the eighteen most popular tax havens in the world,... more
Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleThe clash of worldviews that this book illustrated was a complete eye-opener for me. (Source)

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6
Why do policies and business practices that ignore the moral and generous side of human nature often fail?

Should the idea of economic man—the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus—determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding “no.” Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may “crowd out” ethical and generous motives and thus backfire.
 
But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleHe’s got this interesting combination of an unconventional, technical modeling approach and a very humane sensibility. Both of those are non-mainstream. But I sense that his time has come. (Source)

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7
What the financial diaries of working-class families reveal about economic stresses, why they happen, and what policies might reduce them

Deep within the American Dream lies the belief that hard work and steady saving will ensure a comfortable retirement and a better life for one's children. But in a nation experiencing unprecedented prosperity, even for many families who seem to be doing everything right, this ideal is still out of reach.

In The Financial Diaries, Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider draw on the groundbreaking U.S. Financial Diaries, which follow the...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleI suppose you would put it alongside a number of more general books about what’s been happening to the working and middle classes in America of late. (Source)

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8
"A fascinating new perspective on modern finance," --Oliver Hart, 2016 Nobel Laureate in Economics

"Lucid, witty and delightfully erudite...From the French revolution to film noir, from the history of probability to Jane Austen and The Simpsons, this is an astonishing intellectual feast." --Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

In 1688, essayist Josef de la Vega described finance as both “the fairest and most deceitful business . . . the noblest and the most infamous in the world, the finest and...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleThis is a slightly quirky book, which I really enjoyed reading. It’s about getting over some messages about financial markets using stories. (Source)

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9
A new, evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behavior

Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can't agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe--and as financial bubbles, crashes, and crises suggest. This is one of the biggest debates in economics and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hang on the outcome. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Lo cuts through this debate with a...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleIf you’re doing economics you ought to be thinking about whether your theories and evidence are consistent with what we know from cognitive science and psychology and biology. (Source)

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10

Economics for the Common Good

From the Nobel Prize-winning economist, a bold new agenda for the role of economics in society

When Jean Tirole won the Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by strangers and asked to comment on current events far from his own research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect more deeply on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics can help us improve the shared...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleJean Tirole wrote this book after he won his Nobel Prize in 2014 because, he said, people kept coming up to him and saying, ‘ Tell us what it’s all about!’ For the first time, he felt that he ought to write a book that was accessible to people who wanted to learn from him. (Source)

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Don't have time to read Diane Coyle's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

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11

A Beautiful Mind

Stories of famously eccentric Princetonians abound—such as that of chemist Hubert Alyea, the model for The Absent-Minded Professor, or Ralph Nader, said to have had his own key to the library as an undergraduate. Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s. His most important work had been in... more
Recommended by Ariel Rubinstein, Diane Coyle, and 2 others.

Ariel RubinsteinThe story of John Nash is really a human story – I don’t think it sheds much light on game theory. But it gives hope to people dealing with this disease. (Source)

Diane CoyleThis is a terrific book for just saying something about what game theory helps to do, without plunging you into all the complicated mathematics of how to do it in practice. (Source)

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12
Why has capitalism produced economic growth that so vastly dwarfs the growth record of other economic systems, past and present? Why have living standards in countries from America to Germany to Japan risen exponentially over the past century? William Baumol rejects the conventional view that capitalism benefits society through price competition--that is, products and services become less costly as firms vie for consumers. Where most others have seen this as the driving force behind growth, he sees something different--a compound of systematic innovation activity within the firm, an arms race... more
Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleThe Free Market Innovation Machine is by Will Baumol, one of the most fruitful and creative economists of our time. He wrote my textbook when I was an undergraduate – which was a very long time ago. This is a book about how companies do research, put it into practice and develop new products and services. The real insight in it, which hadn’t really been documented so carefully before, is that big... (Source)

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13
In this cogently and elegantly argued analysis of why human beings persist in engaging in behavior that defies time-honored economic theory, Ormerod also explains why governments and industries throughout the world must completely reconfigure their traditional methods of economic forecasting if they are to succeed and prosper in an increasingly complicated global marketplace. less
Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleButterfly Economics is by an economist who is very critical of most other economists. (Source)

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14
The Company of Strangers shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives. This completely revised and updated edition includes a new chapter analyzing how the rise and fall of social trust explain the unsustainable boom in the global economy over the past decade and the financial crisis that succeeded it.


Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Paul Seabright explores how our evolved ability of abstract reasoning has allowed institutions like money, markets, cities, and the banking system to...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, Anatole Kaletsky, and 2 others.

Diane CoyleThis book is about how the division of labour has become so extensive that everything we do in the economy means that we’re tightly connected to a huge number of other people. (Source)

Anatole KaletskySeabright raises the question of how the biological drive to compete can coexist with the co-operation that makes competitive societies successful. (Source)

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15
Chosen by Pankaj Mishra as one of the Best Books of the Summer

Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.

Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism, socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, Joe Weisenthal, and 2 others.

Diane CoyleThis book is about the philosophical origins of neoliberalism in 1930s Vienna and logical positivism and how it spread globally, particularly into Anglo-Saxon and American universities, and also about the way it underpinned the philosophy of globalization that we have seen take over the world since the 1980s. It’s really interesting to understand that the ideas that we think of as ‘natural’... (Source)

Joe WeisenthalIf anyone's looking for a last-week-of-summer beach read, this book by @zeithistoriker on how we got here is great. https://t.co/YZ6VtRevUc HT: @MattZeitlin for the rec. (Source)

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16
America’s economic revolution isn’t just driven by technology. It’s about markets.

The past twenty-five years have witnessed a remarkable shift in how we get the stuff we want. If you’ve ever owned a business, rented an apartment, or shopped online, you’ve had a front-row seat for this revolution-in-progress. Breakthrough companies like Amazon and Uber have disrupted the old ways and made the economy work better—all thanks to technology.
At least that’s how the story of the modern economy is usually told. But in this lucid, wry book, Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan show...
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Recommended by Reid Hoffman, Diane Coyle, and 2 others.

Reid HoffmanThis book is essential reading for any non-economist who wants to understand how markets shape our world, including transformational marketplaces like Amazon, Airbnb, and eBay. (Source)

Diane CoyleI love this book for explaining, so clearly, a really important area of economics where there has been huge progress in the past 20 years or so. (Source)

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17
A leading artificial intelligence researcher lays out a new approach to AI that will enable us to coexist successfully with increasingly intelligent machines

In the popular imagination, superhuman artificial intelligence is an approaching tidal wave that threatens not just jobs and human relationships, but civilization itself. Conflict between humans and machines is seen as inevitable and its outcome all too predictable.

In this groundbreaking book, distinguished AI researcher Stuart Russell argues that this scenario can be avoided, but only if we...
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Elon MuskWorth reading. (Source)

Diane Coylethere’s a whole clutch of AI books…People want to understand what’s going on. Human Compatible is a really clearly written one. It explains enough about how AI works, but also what some of the challenges are. (Source)

Marcus BorbaBook Review, ‘Human Compatible’: A Book About Artificial Intelligence (#AI) That Asks Some Interesting Questions https://t.co/BCe5JnHPuE @Forbes #ArtificialIntelligence #DataScience #BigData #DeepLearning #Robotics #MachineLearning https://t.co/gKo0mpBeva (Source)

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18
Debates about financial reform have led to the recognition that a healthy financial system doesn't depend solely on how it is structured--organizational culture matters as well. Based on extensive research in a Wall Street derivatives-trading room, Taking the Floor considers how the culture of financial organizations might change in order for them to remain healthy, even in times of crises. In particular, Daniel Beunza explores how the extensive use of financial models and trading technologies over the recent decades has exerted a far-ranging and troubling influence on Wall Street. How... more
Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleSounds a fascinating book https://t.co/FaFENBVkFH (Source)

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19
A leading economist offers a radically new approach to the economic analysis of the law

In The Republic of Beliefs, Kaushik Basu, one of the world's leading economists, argues that the traditional economic analysis of the law has significant flaws and has failed to answer certain critical questions satisfactorily. Why are good laws drafted but never implemented? When laws are unenforced, is it a failure of the law or the enforcers? And, most important, considering that laws are simply words on paper, why are they effective? Basu offers a provocative alternative to how...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, and 1 others.

Diane CoyleIt’s a great book! https://t.co/f8PiXiQQiU (Source)

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20
"Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible―and very profitable business...Rosenthal argues that slaveholders in the American South and Caribbean were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. Techniques that are still used by businesses today."
Marketplace

A Politico Great Weekend Read

Accounting for Slavery is a unique contribution to the decades-long effort to understand New World slavery's complex relationship with capitalism. Through careful...
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Recommended by Diane Coyle, Sarah Taber, and 2 others.

Diane CoyleIt’s a fascinating book by @Eli_B_Cook (I’ve reviewed it for J EconLit). See also https://t.co/5jCq56eTcF https://t.co/h8OpGBjiWn (Source)

Sarah Taber@CarolynVan Funny story, Accounting for Slavery & Scorpio are the ones that kicked the whole thing off. That book is ... just very Scorpio in the best way. (Source)

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Don't have time to read Diane Coyle's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

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  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
21
How America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue...
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Bill GatesI did find his historical analysis, which makes up the bulk of the book, utterly fascinating. (Source)

Brad FeldThe Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War: This book was a grind, but it had a lot of good stuff in it. It’s only 784 pages so it took more than a day to read it. If you are trying to understand what is going on in the current American economy, and why the future will not look like the past, this is a good place to start. (Source)

Satya NadellaCovering everything from the combustion engine to the flush toilet—and judging recent breakthroughs with a skeptical eye—this work of economic history “concludes that innovation is the ultimate source of dramatic improvements in the human condition,” says Nadella. (Source)

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22
David S. Landes tells the long, fascinating story of wealth and power throughout the world: the creation of wealth, the paths of winners and losers, the rise and fall of nations. He studies history as a process, attempting to understand how the world's cultures lead to - or retard - economic and military success and material achievement. Countries of the West, Landes asserts, prospered early through the interplay of a vital, open society focused on work and knowledge, which led to increased productivity, the creation of new technologies, and the pursuit of change. Europe's key advantage lay... more

John KayHe provides an explanation for why Western Europe was the cradle for modern economic growth and looks at the development of the institutions that made modern economic development possible. (Source)

Diane CoyleThe Wealth And Poverty of Nations is one of several really fantastic economic history books of recent times. (Source)

Sean TurnellIt’s the most erudite examination of what causes economic development and growth that’s been written in many decades. (Source)

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Don't have time to read Diane Coyle's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.