Jason Furman's Top Book Recommendations

Jason Furman

@achilleas999 Love that book. Hs a number of themes in common with The Myth of the Rational Voter which we do read. [source]

Jason Furman

At the risk of offending every economist friend of mine who has ever written a book, this is my favorite title of any economics book, the one I most wish I had come up with. And it’s an excellent book, too. The basic thesis is that capitalists—like the CEOs that run major corporations—do not actually like competition or markets. They like to be insulated from competition, to receive subsidies from the government, and inside the corporation it is more like Soviet-style central planning than the stereotypical American capitalism. Rajan and Zingales hate this. But they love markets, competition and capitalism, and see capitalism as a powerful force for allocating resources and propelling innovation. This leads them to want to save “capitalism” from the “capitalists”. [source]

Jason Furman

The Antitrust Paradox was an extremely important book, a real example of how ideas can have a major impact in the world, for better or for worse. It was an important corrective to some of the badly thought-out overreaches in antitrust policy at the time and advocated for concepts that are still relevant today. [source]

Jason Furman

When I was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, one of my outgoing staff members gave me this book as a present on their last day. Lectures on Antitrust Economics is definitely not light reading. But this book of lectures by MIT economist Michael Whinston is important reading, and it played an important role for me. [source]

Jason Furman

I love reading economics and I love reading science fiction. Radical Markets is a great combination of both. This book is by E. Glen Weyl and Eric Posner, son of the Richard who played a critical role in the spread of the Chicago School view. It centers around five ideas for promoting more inclusive growth. Each idea gets its own chapter, beginning with a fictional vignette set in the near future, depicting their idea in action and explaining the economics of the idea. [source]

Jason Furman

The biggest driving force behind politicians misleading the public about trade is the desire to restore a lost heyday of highly paid manufacturing jobs for men without college degrees. This book provides a comprehensive, global, and factually grounded rebuttal to this hope. Full disclosure: Its author, Robert Lawrence, is my colleague at Harvard and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, but I am recommending this because it is the most reliable and comprehensive book on a very important topic. [source]

Jason Furman

Although the book is specifically about India its broader analysis and lessons are relevant for a wide range of emerging economies and an interesting window into what might be the most important economic story of the next four decades. [source]

Jason Furman

Carola Binder, an economics professor, offers a history of inflation and monetary institutions in the United States, studying how they have affected politics, reshaped economic institutions, and upended economic theories. The book has several themes: inflation and disinflation has had a distributional aspect, helping some groups and hurting others; unexpected changes in purchasing power and the value of debts have affected contracting and due process; inflation crises have expanded the role of government; and modern inflation targeting has deep historical roots. [source]

Jason Furman

Chris Miller tells us the history of how microchips were developed, emphasizing the critical role of the government, and especially defense procurement. He gives us a description of how microchips became the single most complex global good, with different pieces and aspects of the technology located in the Netherlands, the United States, Japan, Korea, and especially and most importantly, Taiwan. And he gives us a discussion of the risks that a literal war in Taiwan or an economic war of the type that we are seeing the beginning of could pose for this incredibly important complex and globalized technology. [source]

Jason Furman

Richard Reeves draws on economic research, as well as research from the fields of sociology, psychology, and political science, to tell an under-told story. The book explores the problems faced by boys and men, the roots of those problems, and possible policy solutions….Richard Reeves does not pit his argument against any argument related to the difficulties women face. If somebody says nuclear proliferation is a problem, it does not mean they don’t care about climate change. Similarly, to say there are a set of problems faced by boys and men that need a policy solution, does not mean that you don’t think there are a set of problems facing girls and women that need a policy solution. [source]

Jason Furman

I particularly appreciated The Journey of Humanity because it is an ambitious and deep story about the past tens of thousands of years of economic development that is also well grounded in a growing economics literature into the deep origins of growth that is rigorous, empirically grounded, and peer reviewed—a literature that Oded Galor has been an important contributor to. The book synthesizes and extends this literature, it is not just ungrounded speculation but the product of genuine scholarship. [source]

Jason Furman

It had the best opening sentence of any nonfiction book I read this year: ‘In 2012, 146 million children were born. That was more than in any prior year. It was also more than in any year since. Millions fewer will be born this year. The year 2012 may well turn out to be the year in which the most humans were ever born—ever as in ever for as long as humanity exists.’ Such a simple and obvious fact but I had not known it before. I had to keep reading. For most of modern history, population growth was a background constant; now we may be entering an era of sustained population decline. [source]

Jason Furman

It’s powerful because it’s simple without being simplistic and…is interspersed with engaging personal stories that deepen the substantive argument. Dan Wang’s claim is that China is largely governed by engineers and the United States by lawyers, and that this difference shapes everything from infrastructure to innovation to risk tolerance. Once you adopt that lens, a lot of observed differences suddenly make sense. Engineers tend to optimize for building and execution; lawyers optimize for process, rights, and constraint. Wang is careful not to turn this into a morality play. An engineering mindset can deliver breathtaking speed and scale, but it can also be ruthless when individuals or rights get in the way. That tradeoff—capacity versus constraint—is one of the most illuminating ways to compare political systems. [source]

Jason Furman

At its core, the book is about the persistent fragility of household finances and why market forces alone don’t fix it. Drawing on evidence from the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai show that financial illiteracy is widespread and remarkably persistent. This wouldn’t be quite so troubling if financial markets were forgiving, but they aren’t. Instead, complexity, hidden fees, and product design often exploit consumer weaknesses rather than accommodate them. [source]

Jason Furman

There’s a clear throughline about how U.S. monetary and fiscal choices shape the global system, and how that system, in turn, constrains the United States. The explicit narrative is a warning. Rogoff argues that the era in which the dollar enjoyed unquestioned dominance alongside broad global stability may be fading, and that erosion could bring more frequent or severe crises—sovereign debt problems, inflationary episodes, and financial instability. But running alongside that is a quieter, almost contradictory story. The world has learned. Countries have more flexible exchange rates, larger reserves, less foreign-currency borrowing, and stronger monetary institutions than they did a generation ago. We also have new tools, like central bank swap lines, that didn’t exist in earlier crises. The fact that shocks like COVID did not trigger the kind of cascading emerging-market crises we saw in the 1980s or 1990s is not an accident. It reflects institutional learning. The book is most interesting where these two stories collide. [source]