The Books canon

Sourced and shelved.

Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.

Capital

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

The Affluent Society

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