As we navigate daily world news, we encounter headlines about wars, global markets, and cities grappling with climate change. How can we make sense of these interconnected topics to guide better decision-making for the future? In How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Human History, Harvard-trained economist Andrew Leigh argues that economics offers the tools to answer these questions and improve our lives.

In Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World, Farmer emphasizes that statistical analysis can help us understand the present but can infer future trends only if underlying behaviors remain consistent. He advocates for complexity economics, which analyzes networks of balance sheets from the bottom up, treating the economy as a dynamic system using “as-is” reasoning rather than hypothetical “as-if” models. Unlike traditional models, complexity economics builds from the granular interactions between agents, emphasizing dynamic systems and the inherent uncertainty of economic behaviors.

As conversations and discussions from the UNGA meetings last week continue to resonate, I thought about Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide To Changing Capitalism by Mariana Mazzucato. Mariana Mazzucato is a professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London. She is also the founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purposes. She advises on global policymakers and is chair of the World Health Organization’s Council on the Economics of Health for All and a member of the UN’s High-level Advocacy Board on Economic and Social Affairs.

One of my summer reads in 2023 was The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington.

Thomas Sowell's book, Basic Economics: a common sense guide to the economy, is written in plain language. The book has over…

Angus Deaton is a British-American economist and a winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is a professor of Economics and…

“Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson is an ambitious book published in 2012. The book is a scholarly work by…