Robert J Shiller's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

1

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Richard H. Thaler

4.1

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving educ

Recommended by Dan Ariely, Vinod Khosla, Vinod Khosla, and 18 others.

Robert J Shiller

The government, which in their model is benevolent, sets up rules that encourage people to make the right choices, that nudge people to make the right decisions. [source]

Dan Ariely

Author

Nudge is a very important book. One of the reasons Nudge is so important is because it’s taking these ideas and applying them to the policy domain. Here are the mistakes we make. Here are the ways marketers are trying to influence us. Here’s the way we might be able to fight back. If policymakers understood these principles, what could they do? The other important thing about the book is that it describes, in detail, small interventions. It’s basically a book about cheap persuasion. [source]

Eric Ries

Founder/Long-Term Stock Exchange

A pioneer in behavioral economics and just recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, his classic book on how to make better decisions. [source]

2

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith

4.2

Best known for his revolutionary free-market economics treatise The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith was first and foremost a moral philosopher. In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he investigated the flip side of economic self-interest: the interest of the greater good. Smith's classic work advances ideas about conscience, moral judgement and virtue that have taken on renewed importan

Recommended by Barack Obama, Karl Rove, Ryan Holiday, and 2 others.

Robert J Shiller

Smith has an interest in exposing human traits that are relevant to thinking about our daily lives, and he has a surprisingly insightful ability to do that. [source]

Barack Obama

Former USA President

Obama, unsurprisingly, appears to be more drawn to stories sympathetic to the working classes than is McCain. Obama cites John Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle,” about a labor dispute; Robert Caro’s “Power Broker,” about Robert Moses; and Studs Terkel’s “Working.” But he also includes Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and “Theory of Moral Sentiments” on his list. [source]

Karl Rove

There [source]

3

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy

Raghuram G. Rajan

4.3

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In "Fault Lines," Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devast

Recommended by Francis Fukuyama, George A. Akerlof, and Robert J Shiller.

Robert J Shiller

I admire this book because it’s not superficial. It goes for the ultimate causes of the economic crisis we’ve been through. Most people tend to focus in on something approximate. [source]

Francis Fukuyama

He accepts the fact that the crisis had multiple causes but he argues that redistribution done through subsidised lending is one of the most inefficient and dangerous ways to do redistribution. [source]

George A. Akerlof

Fault Lines provides an excellent analysis of the lessons to be learned from the financial crisis, and the difficult choices that lie ahead. Of the many books written in the wake of our recent economic meltdown, this is the one that gets it right. [source]

4

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.

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]

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]

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]

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5

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

4.3

A groundbreaking work that identifies the real culprit behind one of the great economic crimes of our time— the growing inequality of incomes between the vast majority of Americans and the richest of the rich.

We all know that the very rich have gotten a lot richer these past few decades while most Americans haven’t. In fact, the exorbitantly paid have continued to thrive during the current econom

Recommended by Keith Ellison, Matthew Yglesias, and Robert J Shiller.

Robert J Shiller

This book is about rising inequality and it traces back to fundamental causes. I like books that get back to ultimate causes and that think like social scientists about these causes. The question is, ‘Why is inequality getting worse in so many different countries?’ This book particularly focuses on the US. There are a number of traditional answers, but the most prominent among them is this idea that in a modern economy there is a skill bias in technical change. Our computers and communications have led to a winner-take-all society, where only the really smart can make money. [source]

Keith Ellison

Winner-Take-All Politics puts complex economic ideas into language that we understand. It takes a fresh look at the increase in inequality over the last thirty to forty years. [source]

Matthew Yglesias

It’s had a huge impact among people who are inclined to read and talk about books. I’m not sure how far that goes in Washington. Unfortunately, one of the problems with becoming a powerful politician is that you don’t really have time to read anything. But its importance is definitely not just an idiosyncratic inclination of mine. Everyone has been reading it. Everyone has been writing and talking about it. I should also point out that Jacob Hacker was one of the major intellectual movers behind what became the healthcare reform law, the signature achievement of the Obama era. [source]