Great Books

I had many memorable conversations with colleagues and friends about how great books ignite ideas and actions. To quote C. G. Jung, "no tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell." In very much the same way, meaningful research is grounded in depth, complexity, and history—all of which books provide in abundance.

Below is a list of books that I found particularly inspiring. This is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, but as the Chinese proverb goes, "it is always good to open a book/开卷有益."

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World - Liaquat Ahamed

Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market - Walter Bagehot

A Crash Course on Crises: Macroeconomic Concepts for Run-Ups, Collapses, and Recoveries - Markus Brunnermeier, Ricardo Reis

How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle - Ray Dalio

Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 - Barry Eichengreen

In Defense of Public Debt - Barry Eichengreen, Asmaa El-Ganainy, Rui Esteves, Kris James Mitchener

Economics in "Blossom Shanghai" - Xiang Fang

Macroeconomics and Financial Crises: Bound Together by Information Dynamics - Gary Gorton, Guillermo Ordoñez

Debt: The First 5000 Years - David Graeber

The Making of a Bourgeois State: War, Politics and Finance During the Dutch Revolt - Marjolein 't Hart

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Marc Levinson

The Unloved Dollar Standard: From Bretton Woods to the Rise of China - Ronald McKinnon

Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System - Perry Mehrling

House of Debt: How They caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again - Atif Mian and Amir Sufi

International Currency Experience: Lessons of the Inter-War Period - Ragnar Nurkse

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined - Lasse Heje Pedersen

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy - Raghuram Rajan

This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly - Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff

Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead - Kenneth Rogoff

A Financial Revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands - James Tracy

Gold and the Dollar Crisis. The Future of Convertibility - Robert Triffin

Marco Polo Was in China. New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues - Hans Ulrich Vogel

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

How China Escaped the Poverty Trap - Yuen Yuen Ang

The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence - Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman

History of Southern Ming Dynasty - Cheng Gu

National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade - Albert Hirschman

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements - Eric Hoffer

1587, a Year of No Significance - Renyu Huang

Power and Interdependence - Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 - Paul Kennedy

A Tract on Monetary Reform - John Maynard Keynes

Power and Money: The Economics of International Politics and the Politics of International Economics - Charles Kindleberger

Ming Dynasty 1566 - Heping Liu

From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China - Lizhi Liu

The Complete Yes Minister - Jonathan Lynn, Antony Jay

The Long Economic and Political Shadow of History - Stelios Michalopoulos, Elias Papaioannou

Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology - Chris Miller

Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance - Douglass North

The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities - Mancur Olson

Capital in the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Piketty

Merits and Demerits of Political Systems in Dynastic China - Mu Qian

The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism - Richard Swedberg, Joseph A. Schumpeter

The Hero with a Thousand Faces  - Joseph Campbell

The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion - Mircea Eliade

The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry - Henri Ellenberger

The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious - Carl Gustav Jung

Foundations of Human Memory - Michael Kahana

The Art and Science of Personality Development - Dan McAdams

The Origins and History of Consciousness - Erich Neumann