Books like The Prosperity Paradox by Clayton M Christensen

An economic analysis that examines how industrial productivity can reduce global poverty and strengthen international stability.

Amartya Sen’s 1999 book analyzes international development as a process of expanding human freedom.

David S. Landes explores the historical forces that have shaped global wealth and poverty, arguing that open societies driven by work and knowledge, especially through invention, have led to economic and military success.

"More than four billion people--some 60 percent of humanity--live in debilitating poverty, on less than $5 per day. The standard narrative tells us this crisis is a natural phenomenon, having to do with climate, geography, and culture. It tells us all we have to do is give aid to help poor countries up the development ladder. If poor countries would only adopt the right institutions and economic policies, they could join the ranks of the rich world. Anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that this story ignores the broader political forces at play. Global poverty--and the growing inequality between the rich countries of Europe and North America and the poor ones of Africa, Asia, and South America--has come about because the global economy has been designed over the course of five centuries to favor the interests of the most powerful nations. Global inequality is not natural, inevitable, or accidental. To close the divide, Hickel proposes dramatic action rooted in real justice: abolishing debt burdens in the global South, democratizing the institutions of global governance, and rolling out an international minimum wage, among other steps. Only then will we have a chance at a world built on equal footing."--Jacket flap.

In The Trouble with Prosperity, James Grant tells why the financial good times of the 1990s are destined to collapse. To understand the current bull market, he argues, we must examine a seventy-year cycle of boom and bust. Through the tale of a single building - 40 Wall Street - and other stories, Grant gives us a way of understanding the rise and fall of great fortunes, the vicissitudes of investment strategies, and the colorful personalities who battled for fiscal survival and supremacy from 1929 - the year of foundation for 40 Wall Street was laid down - to the bull market of the 1990s, when real-estate mogul Donald Trump bought it. Grant insists that the hidden source of the strength of the Dow is heresy - ideas that were deemed financially sinful only a generation ago and have now been embraced with a millennial fervor. Alas, what goes up must come down. This is a book about cycles of optimism and pessimism, of bull markets and bear markets, and of orthodoxy and apostasy, which, as Grant writes, are as old as the capital markets themselves. Grant's underlying theme is counterintuitive, even perverse. Success is universally praised, failure disparaged, but Grant seeks to understand the neglected virtues of failure. As he puts it, "Booms do not merely precede busts. In some important sense, they cause them." How and why that is so is the question he seeks to answer. Because people in markets make mistakes, he observes, tearing down is an indispensable part of the process of building up. The errors of the up cycle must be sorted out, reorganized, or auctioned off. Any social system can cope with success, but the genius of capitalism, he insights, is that it also excels at failure. And failure, he concludes, is at the least instructive, provided we are willing to draw its lessons. Moreover, it lays the foundation for later success. But too often we suppress its symptoms; we do so, Grant warns, at our peril.