The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis is a really good read with an excellent survey of economic history and the accompanying political economics from WW II to the present. To understand the social dimension of what economics has wrought I recommend Karl Polanyi's superb The Great Transformation 1944. It is a combination of the early social and economic history of England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution through the transformation of English society into a market economy plus the impact of that transformation in other countries.  It will show the reader just what that meant. A foundational work neglected because it is too revealing.  

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

watching italians mourning the deaths from bad weather in sardegna (some avoidable if rescue efforts had been better funded, not to mention flood prevention schemes made with shoddy cement or stalled in piles of bureaucracy), while contemplating the latest edicts from the troika, or the price of new  -apparently indispensable- f-35 jets, it seems like some are slowly getting it that it doesn't have to be this way.

and it always comes back to what keynes pointed out quite clearly to non-dummies so long ago.

so keynesianism needs to be spelled out in no uncertain terms as the true understanding of how economies work.

'renter euthanasia' needs to become as common a parlance as 'power to the people' or 'workers of the world unite'. right now keynes' prose, elegant, succinct and logical as it is, flies right over most folks' heads... whooooosh!

yet is keynesianism really above the intellectual range of a 12 year old, if rendered in such a way as would be the most pedagogically advanced? we have surely come a long way since then at simplifying matters once deemed too arcane for public consumption, like relativity, quantum theory and mechanics etc.

doubtless there are scads of funny, creative vids on utoob, maybe that's the way forward as more kids watch them than read... economics is veiled in mystification, but even the most counter-intuitive parts of keynes' reasoning is utterly coherent with history so really shouldn't be rocket science, it seems after perusing all the motley ruminations on ET since the net was knee-high.

ET's brainz trust could definitely write it, a good cartoonist would help a lot too.

then we could all help it go viral, sharing until our mice beg for mercy.


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

For economical history I would rather recommend reading Ferdinand Braudels' Civilizations and Capitalism which gives a broad overview of global economic history with a focus on industrialisation and Europe. If it is too heavy the summary, The Dynamics of Capitalism, condenses the argument but leaves out much of bildung.

The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pommeranz and The Industrious revolution are other interesting takes on industrialisation and economic development, but are not good as starting points since they are so driven by their respective thesis.

Tony Judts' Postwar - a history of Europe since 1945 is a magisterial overview of modern European history. It is an excellent foundation from which to approach more thesis driven works about Europe today.

you are the media you consume.

And I'd recommend reading The Great Crash 1929 before either of Lewis' books. Lewis tells the story of that which is different, but that story is best understood through the perspective granted by the story of that which is the same.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

must-reads also 'working' and 'the good war'.

so accessible, so evocative...

sorta like a cross of kuralt, bageant and moyers, with bells on.


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty