Books on the main economic theories

It's never too late to walk into a library and start devouring books, and summer is the best time to do so. In this article we offer you 15 titles, classic and contemporary, to discover the most interesting economic and financial theories.

1. Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776). This work is considered by many to be the Bible of modern economics and it was enough for the author to be recognized as the father of this science. In its pages, Smith lays the foundations of economic liberalism. He ensures that self-interest is the driving force behind all business, explains how a country's wealth is generated by work, and defends the free market system along with the renowned "invisible hand" theory.
2. Principles of Political Economy and Tax, David Ricardo (1817). Another great exponent of the classical school. Sharing various points of Adam Smith's thinking, in this book Ricardo explains, among other things, what benefits nations can achieve with international trade.
3. Das Kapital, Karl Marx (1867). 150 years have already passed since its publication, yet it is undeniable how this treaty has affected political economy since then. Given Marx's essential work, his reading is indeed complex: the author exposes the production method of the capitalist system, analyzing concepts such as commodities, money and wages.
4. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John M. Keynes (1936). With this work, the English economist responded to the Great Depression of 1929, revolutionizing established classical liberal thought. Keynesian theory tries to disprove the principle that states should not intervene in the economy and, instead, defends their stimulus in times of crisis. It was chosen as the most impactful academic book in the UK.
5. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Ludwig von Mises (1949). In the more than a thousand pages of the book, Mises shares a particularly interesting vision: he discards the mathematical and predictable dimension of the planned economy in favor of a human conception of it. The treatise, brilliant and essential for an economist, is always current.
6. History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1954). This work (which remains unfinished) aims to explain the evolution of economic thought starting from Ancient Greece. La visione multidisciplinare di questo trattato lo ha reso uno dei libri fondamentali per coloro che desiderano conoscere in modo approfondito la storia dell'economia.
7. Economic Theory from Smith to Keynes, Amiya Kumar Dasgupta (1999). Over the span of a century and a half, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, economic thought has proposed various interpretations of the capitalist system. With the reading of Dasgupta, economic theories appear to us not as moments of a single path of development of economic thought, but as alternative theories, all current, to which we can turn from time to time to interpret the economic contexts that most closely resemble those in which each theory was conceived.
8. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (2005). When New York Times reporter Stephen J. Dubner went to interview Steven Levitt, he realized he wasn't a traditional economist. Instead of writing about stock markets, Levitt applies economics in this book to explain, for example, what sumo wrestlers and professors have in common or why crime declined in the 1990s. In other words, economics allows Levitt to observe how things work in the real world.
9. L'economia dei poveri. (Capire la vera natura della povertà per combatterla), Abhijit V. Banerjee e Esther Duflo (2011). Perché un uomo in Marocco che non può permettersi di mangiare comprerebbe un televisore? Per rispondere a domande di questo genere, questi economisti MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology hanno deciso di liberarsi dalle credenze sulla povertà più radicate. Hanno svolto le loro ricerche nei paesi dei cinque continenti per comprendere i problemi specifici della vita economica dei poveri e trovare delle soluzioni.
10. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Niall Ferguson (2008). How to suggest in an evocative way that finances move the world. The author provides an insight into the story from the appearance of money in ancient Babylon to the present economic crisis at the time of the book's publication. The goal: to make us understand the importance of money through good writing.
11. Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity and poverty, Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson. (2012). Why are some nations rich and others poor? According to this study, the wealth of nations does not depend on geography, culture or genetics, but on their institutions and the level of participation they allow. Throughout the 600 pages of the book, the authors give proof of this with real examples: Nogales (USA), Botswana, North and South Korea.
12. The Price of Inequality, Joseph E. Stiglitz (2012). Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz offers a critical analysis of the current financial situation. In this book, he tries to explain why our economic system is not working for most American citizens, why inequality is increasing, and what the consequences are.
13. Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Thomas Piketty (2013). The thesis of this French economist has generated intense debate. This data-rich book addresses the evolution of income and wealth over two centuries, explaining economic inequality in Europe and the United States.
14. Keynes or Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, Nicholas Wapshott (2013). This book focuses on one of the main questions of the economy: To what extent should governments intervene in the markets? The names of Keynes and Hayek suggest totally opposite positions in this debate. Wapshott retrieves the doctrines of these two great economists and analyzes how they would disagree, if they were alive, on today's crisis.
15. The Big Short, Michael Lewis (2013). In this chronicle Lewis addresses one of the lesser known aspects of the crisis: tells the story of the characters who, having foreseen the collapse of the real estate sector, acted accordingly to profit from it, making investments before the bubble burst.