A working library is an exploration of—and advocate for—Collections
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The Big Short
Michael Lewis
Infuriatingly good. There isn’t another writer alive who could take the obscurities of subprime mortgages and credit default swaps and deliver a page-turner like this one. Lewis’ storytelling abilities come at a price, however: I now fully understand the extent to which Wall Street is completely and unforgivably fucked.
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The Value of Nothing
Raj Patel
Raj Patel carefully demonstrates how traditional economics fails to properly account for many costs (whether environmental or social) and argues that the tragedy of the commons is one borne of privatization and corporatism, not an innate fact of the commoners themselves.
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Deep Economy
Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben indicts the current economic system for it’s single-minded pursuit of “more” without regard for whether or not it is (or can be) “better.” The contemporary companion to Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.
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Small Is Beautiful
E.F. Schumacher
Schumacher brilliantly interrogates modern economics, revealing its philosophical underpinnings to be relentless supporters of goods over people. He proposes an alternative—a Buddhist economics—that takes as its imperative the quality of human life, not the quantity of profit. An excellent companion to Rushkoff’s Life Inc. in the argument that economics is not a natural science.
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Life Inc.
Douglass Rushkoff
A passionate, well-written text that argues that our centralized currency system is the key to the corporatism that has infected not only our government but our daily lives.
