If you’re in search of Christmas gifts or a good book for yourself to read over the holidays, look no further than recommendations from the Economics Observatory.
This year at the Economics Observatory, we have published over 140 articles and hundreds of data visualisations. Many have focused on the UK economy – including an election economics series in the summer, themed pieces on management and productivity, and analysis of 25 years of devolution. Others have explored more global challenges – from climate change to conflict.
Our back catalogue provides plenty of reading for the holidays. But if you’re looking for a few longer reads, you can dive into the following recommendations from some of our lead editors and colleagues.
The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars by Cormac Ó Gráda
War is ugly. As with many other years in human history, 2024 has revealed to us that the casualties of wars are not just combatants but too often civilians as well.
In this book, Cormac Ó Gráda – one of the world’s leading economic historians – evaluates all the evidence available, and estimates that the two world wars cost 65 million civilian lives. This figure is more than 30 million higher than previous estimates, and nearly two-thirds of the total 100 million casualties of the two wars. Famines induced by the wars were the single largest cause of death, ending around 30 million lives.
The popular economics blog Marginal Revolution has rightly named it as its non-fiction book of the year. More accolades are sure to follow. Ó Gráda’s careful study reveals much about the true human costs of the wars and the price paid by civilians across the world. He tells this horrible history carefully, humanely and poignantly. The Hidden Victims should be widely read – lest we forget.
Recommended by John Turner (Queen’s University Belfast)
The Long War: The Inside Story of America and Afghanistan Since 9/11 by David Loyn
This book begins with the arrival of the Taliban in Kabul in 1996 and ends with the announcement of US troop withdrawals from Afghanistan in 2021. Loyn, a former BBC foreign correspondent, highlights how changing political and tactical priorities – accompanied by a lack of a clear, overarching strategy – undermined military and state-building efforts in the country, costing the United States an estimated $300 million a day for two decades.
With conflicts flaring around the world today, and news of Afghan women’s rights being increasingly withdrawn, The Long War is a stark reminder of the importance of leaning from the past.
Recommended by Ashley Lait (Economics Observatory)
Home in the World: A Memoir by Amartya Sen
This is a marvellous memoir from an economist whom I knew well during my graduate studies at Nuffield College, Oxford. Interwoven into the book are the reflections and insights of a long-lived and wise person. It starts from his childhood in what is now Bangladesh in the 1930s and finishes in 1964, with his return to India.
You learn a lot about Amartya Sen himself of course, but there are also amazing portraits of the people he has interacted with, many of them economists. For me, the story of Italian economist, Piero Sraffa, was the most interesting: I never knew he was a confidant of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Many interesting people appear if only briefly, including Kamala Harris as a toddler. Sen creates a portrait of Cambridge in the 1950s with characters such as economists Maurice Dobb, Nicholas Kaldor and the young James Mirrlees (who was to become my PhD supervisor).
Perhaps most interesting is Sen’s insights into imperial India in the late 1930s and 1940s. Many of his male relatives were jailed for ‘preventative custody’ and he used to visit them in the colonial prisons. He also witnessed first-hand both the Bengal famine and the partition of India (his family had to move to West Bengal). I also learned that the poet and Bengali icon Rabindranath Tagore wrote both the Bengali and Indian national anthems. Lastly, the title itself is a reference to Satyajit Ray’s film Home and the World for those unfamiliar with the legendary Bengali film director.
Recommended by Huw Dixon (Cardiff University)
Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy by Carola Binder
This book is a monetary history focused on the United States, but it captures ideas that spread more widely. In particular, it highlights the complex interrelations between inflation and politics – an issue that has once again come to the fore in 2024 as many governments that were incumbent during the recent inflation spikes got punished at the ballot box.
Recommended by Michael McMahon (University of Oxford)
The Longevity Imperative: Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives by Andrew Scott
The potentially negative economic consequences of an ageing society are widely discussed. But at the same time, trends in life expectancy mean that we are living longer and are on average in good health for longer – all of which should be good news for the economy.
Andrew Scott’s latest book focuses on those possible upsides – and what they imply for policy-makers working on employment, education and healthcare; for business leaders looking at new opportunities and new ways of working; and for each of us individually, from young to old, thinking about our careers, our finances and our health. As he writes: ‘There are few things so obviously important for our individual and collective future than how we age – and we need to be as ambitious about adjustment and adaptation to longer lives as we are to artificial intelligence and climate change’.
Recommended by Romesh Vaitilingam (Economics Observatory)
Two books on the United States
There are two books that I have read this year, both about Appalachia, that provide a backdrop to Donald Trump’s re-election as US president. Like many others, I read Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by vice president elect JD Vance, because I was curious about who Trump had picked as his running mate. It’s a powerful story about a tough upbringing that sheds light on why Vance is so keen on the institution of marriage (less so on why he has it in for ‘childless cat ladies’). But basically, it’s a classic personal redemption story that speaks to the power of individuals to overcome adversity.
More interesting is Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Like Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, on which it is based, the book exposes social and economic inequalities. And unlike Vance, Kingsolver sees the institutional forces that shape and constrain individuals: mining companies extracting Appalachia’s natural resources and gaining monopsonistic power in local labour markets in order to exploit workers; Big Pharma pushing opioids on vulnerable communities in the interests of profit; and the broken system of care that leaves so many children vulnerable.
The two books take opposing views on economic inequality. In Vance’s world, the difference between winning and losing the game of life is individual responsibility and hard work; Kingsolver recognises the role of luck and the fact that some people will be dealt a bad hand at birth.
Recommended by Sarah Smith (University of Bristol)
Several books on artificial intelligence
I’ve been reading a lot about AI to help me think about potential economic impacts, and there have been a lot of new books on the subject. Two I enjoyed were by colleagues: The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI by Neil Lawrence (DeepMind professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge), and AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI's Future and Save Our Own by Verity Harding (who is running an AI and geopolitics project with us at the Bennett Institute).
AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor is an excellent hype-debunking text. Scott Shapiro’s Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks is a page-turner about cybersecurity that has terrific explanations of digital technology and its vulnerabilities. For a broader perspective on the role of information in organisations, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – And How The World Lost its Mind by Dan Davies is excellent, drawing on old studies of cybernetics.
Reviews of these and many other books on economics, business and technology are on my blog The Enlightened Economist.
Recommended by Diane Coyle (Bennett Institute, University of Cambridge)
If you are still looking for more suggestions, you can read our recommendations from last year here or if you refer audio format, you can listen to the recordings from this year’s Bristol Festival of Economics. Don’t forget that you can also submit any questions that you’d like us to answer in the new year.
In the meantime, happy holidays from the Economics Observatory!
