Books like Setting the Table by Danny Meyer

Nudge offers a practical guide to libertarian paternalism, showing how subtle design changes can help people make wiser decisions without restricting freedom.

Donald Trump shares his secrets for making a fortune and running a successful business in his book 'How to Get Rich'.

Matthew B. Crawford argues that working with hands restores dignity and fulfillment, critiques the shift toward knowledge work, and champions manual trades as a way to connect mind, body, and community.

James Surowiecki shows how large groups can outthink experts, explaining the power of collective wisdom across culture, psychology, business, and politics.

An examination of the 2001‑2009 U.S. financial crises, focusing on monetary policy decisions and the role of the Federal Reserve in shaping economic outcomes.

Cheap. Cheap suit. Cheap date. Cheap shot. It's a dirty word, an epithet laden with negative meanings. It is also the story of Lauren Weber's life. As a child, she resented her father for keeping the heat at 50 degrees through the frigid New England winters and rarely using his car's turn signals-to keep them from burning out. But as an adult, when she found herself walking 30 blocks to save $2 on subway fare, she realized she had turned into him. In this lively treatise on the virtues of being cheap, Weber explores provocative questions about Americans' conflicted relationship with consumption and frugality. Why do we ridicule people who save money? Where's the boundary between thrift and miserliness? Is thrift a virtue or a vice during a recession? And was it common sense or obsessive-compulsive disorder that made her father ration the family's toilet paper? In answering these questions, In Cheap We Trust offers a colorful ride through the history of frugality in the United States. Readers will learn the stories behind Ben Franklin and his famous maxims, Hetty Green (named "the world's greatest miser" by the Guinness Book of Records) and the stereotyping of Jewish and Chinese immigrants as cheap. Weber also explores contemporary expressions and dilemmas of thrift. From Dumpster-diving to economist John Maynard Keynes's "Paradox of Thrift" to today's recession-driven enthusiasm for frugal living, In Cheap We Trust teases out the meanings of cheapness and examines the wisdom and pleasures of not spending every last penny.

Lords of Finance retraces the 1929 collapse through portraits of four central bankers whose policy choices unleashed the Great Depression.

Examines how the 2008 global financial crisis reshaped the domestic and international economy, tracing its enduring impacts and the new economic realities that emerged over the past decade.

A collection of business profiles by renowned journalist Joseph Nocera that reexamines the moral lines in finance, revealing unexpected virtues in infamous figures and hidden flaws in celebrated leaders.

Bill George argues that authentic leadership—rooted in mission, ethics, and self‑growth—creates superior shareholder value, using his 12‑year tenure at Medtronic to illustrate how purpose can drive market success.

The ideas of John Maynard Keynes have never been more timely. No one has bettered Keynes's description of the psychology of investors during a financial crisis: ‘The practice of calmness and immobility, of certainty and security, suddenly breaks down. New fears and hopes will, without warning, take charge of human conduct… the market will be subject to waves of optimistic and pessimistic sentiment.' Keynes's preeminent biographer, Robert Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, brilliantly synthesizes from Keynes's career and life the aspects of his thinking that apply most directly to the world we currently live in. In so doing, Skidelsky shows that Keynes's mixture of pragmatism and realism – which distinguished his thinking from the neo-classical or Chicago school of economics that has been the dominant influence since the Thatcher-Reagan era and which made possible the raw market capitalism that created the current global financial crisis – is more pertinent and applicable than ever. Crucially Keynes offers nervous capitalists – and Keynes never wavered in his belief in the capitalist system – a positive answer to the question we now face: When unbridled capitalism falters, is there an alternative? "In the long run," as Keynes famously said, "we are all dead". We may not have time to wait for the perfect theoretical operation of capital as the neo-classicists insist will happen eventually. In the meantime, we have Keynes: more supple, more human and more magnificently real than ever.