The Books canon

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Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
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2 volumes
SortEditorial Year Title
Subject·Economic inequality✕clear
Nonfiction · Economics

The Affluent Society

John Kenneth Galbraith
1958 · 276 pages

Galbraith looked at postwar America and saw private opulence beside public squalor, with production manufacturing the wants it satisfies. Two generations of arguments over taxes and public spending have run in his channel.

★ 6.3
Nonfiction · Economics

Capital

Thomas Piketty
2013 · 816 pages

Piketty mined two centuries of tax records for the engine of inequality: capital grows faster than the economy, so fortunes pull away from wages. It made inequality the West's central political question.

★ 6.7