Why do some ideas make it big while others fail to take off? According to award-winning behavioural economist John List, the answer comes down to a single question: Can the idea scale?

Here Robert Baker reviews this book alongside "Kochland. The secret history of Koch Industries and corporate power in America", by Christopher Leonard, 2020, Simon & Schuster UK.

Here Robert Baker reviews this book "If Then: How One Data Company Invented The Future", by Jill Lepore.

We think we’ve seen financial innovation. We bank from laptops and buy coffee with the wave of a phone. But these are minor miracles compared with the dizzying experiments now underway around the globe, as businesses and governments alike embrace the possibilities of new financial technologies. As Eswar Prasad explains, the world of finance is at the threshold of major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states, and indeed all of us.

Digital technology, big data, big tech, machine learning, and AI are revolutionizing both the tools of economics and the phenomena it seeks to measure, understand, and shape. In Cogs and Monsters, Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems—but also opportunities—facing economics today if it is to respond effectively to these dizzying changes and help policymakers solve the world’s crises, from pandemic recovery and inequality to slow growth and the climate emergency.

The Spirit of Green by Nobel laureate William Nordhaus offers a primer on the economics of the environment and some key steps to limit global warming.

This book considers how individual economic choices in response to climate change will transform the larger economy.

Lorenzo Forni examines the tension between economics and politics and considers why so many mistakes in economic policy-making are made for political reasons.

Gregory Smith guides us expertly through the travails and successes in forty years of Sub-Saharan Africa’s debt and warns that we may still see a rerun of the 1980s borrowing boom that ended in a two-decade-long debt crisis.

Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through tells the story of how Britain's economy and politics have interacted with each other from the time of the Industrial Revolution right up to the pandemic of 2020.