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?

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the wall of Wittenberg church. He argued that the Church’s internally consistent but absurd doctrines had pickled into a dogmatic structure of untruth. It was time for a Reformation. Half a millennium later, Steve Keen argues that economics needs its own Reformation.

The Resilient Society, by Princeton University economist Markus Brunnermeier, describes how individuals, institutions, and nations can successfully navigate a dynamic, globalized economy filled with unknown risks.

This collection of contributions from 12 authors covers financial crises in Western Europe and USA from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.

Supercharge Me is grounded in relentless realism about how governments, businesses and individuals actually behave. It draws lessons from what has worked so far: positive incentives and smart regulations. Through a series of fast-paced dialogues, the authors introduce practical ideas for change that will embolden activists, reinvigorate the disheartened, and reframe the climate crisis as an opportunity.

In Strategic Risk Management: Designing Portfolios and Managing Risk, Campbell R. Harvey, Sandy Rattray, and Otto Van Hemert deliver a reimagining of the risk management process.

An essential guide to the intractable public debates about the virtues and vices of economic globalization, cutting through the complexity to reveal the fault lines that divide us and the points of agreement that might bring us together.

As a correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde, world-renowned economist Thomas Piketty has documented the rise and fall of Trump, the drama of Brexit, Emmanuel Macron’s ascendance to the French presidency, the unfolding of a global pandemic, and much else besides, always from the perspective of his fight for a more equitable world.

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98 charts Russell Napier’s personal journey during that crisis as he wrote daily for institutional investors about an increasingly uncertain future. Relying on contemporaneous commentary, it charts the mistakes and successes of investors in the battle for investment survival in Asia from 1995–98.

Masaaki Shirakawa, who led the bank as governor from 2008 to 2013, provides a rare insider’s account of the workings of Japanese economic and monetary policy during this period and how it challenged mainstream economic thinking.

Since the original publication of Nudge more than a decade ago, the word has entered the vocabulary of businesspeople, policy makers, engaged citizens and consumers everywhere. Now, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have updated the book, making use of their experiences in and out of government over the past dozen years as well as an explosion of new research.

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.