Mark Blyth's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Mark Blyth recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Mark Blyth's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

Karl Polanyi

4.4

In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyzes the economic and social changes brought about by the "great transformation" of the Industrial Revolution. His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism. New introductory material reveals the renewed importanc

Recommended by Satya Nadella, Dani Rodrik, and Mark Blyth.

Mark Blyth

A story which stretches from 1815 to 1914. He says it was 100 years of peace, although that’s not actually true because if you were a colonial subject it was hardly peaceful. [source]

Satya Nadella

CEO/Microsoft

"My father recommended this book long ago,” says Nadella of the 1944 classic by a Hungarian-American writer who chronicles the development of England’s market economy and argues that society should drive economic change. [source]

Dani Rodrik

It makes a rather important point, that the economy has always been embedded in society, and when we try to disembed it from society and treat it like an independent institution, then we’re really going to run into trouble. [source]

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

John Maynard Keynes

4.0

Distinguished British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) set off a series of movements that drastically altered the ways in which economists view the world. In his most important work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), Keynes critiqued the laissez-faire policies of his day, particularly the proposition that a normally functioning market economy would bring full e

Recommended by Eric Weinstein, Mark Blyth, and Paul Krugman.

Mark Blyth

This is an incredibly important book because it shows us that Adam Smith was only right in a special case. [source]

Eric Weinstein

Managing Director/Thiel Capital

Folks frequently ask “What are the books that changed your life?” If I tell them, they are usually radically disappointed. I find that curious. I just cleared out of an office, and these are books that mattered enough to me to bring home. So here they are. [source]

Paul Krugman

It is a difficult book, because it’s the first book that tries to figure this stuff out. You don’t teach Keynesian economics from Keynes anymore. Keynes was actually working on The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money before the Great Depression, but, obviously, the Great Depression gave it urgency. It’s a first stab – it’s one hell of a first stab – but because it is a first stab, it’s got all the awkwardnesses that go with that. He goes off on tangents that seemed important to him at the time, but don’t seem so important now. It’s not an easy read. [source]

The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph

Albert O. Hirschman, Jeremy Adelman, Amartya Sen

4.4

In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests--so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice--was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation f

Recommended by Mark Blyth, Robert J Shiller, and Will Davies.

Mark Blyth

The notion in the whole book is that it is far better for man to lord it over his bank balance than it is over his fellow man. [source]

Robert J Shiller

When we reflect on some of the horrors of capitalism, we have to consider that things could have been much worse if we didn’t have this system. Our fights would have been on real battlefields, rather than economic battlefields. [source]

Will Davies

The core question in Hirschman’s book is actually in its subtitle: ‘Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph’. Like Weber, Hirschman realised that, first, there is nothing natural about capitalism. [source]

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World

Barrington Moore

4.3

"A landmark in comparative history and a challenge to scholars of all lands who are trying to learn how we arrived at where we are now." -The New York Times Book Review

Recommended by Mark Blyth.

The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy

Albert O. Hirschman

4.2

With engaging wit and subtle irony, Albert Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of reactionary rhetoric in which conservative public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing against progressive agendas and reforms for the past two hundred years.

Hirschman draws his examples from three successive waves of reactive thought that arose in response to the liberal ideas of the Fre

Recommended by Mark Blyth.

Mark Blyth

He says that when the same arguments have been used without much modification for 300 years regardless of the area in which they are deployed, we should be suspicious of them. [source]