Books like The lever of riches by Joel Mokyr

Jared Diamond explains how geography, biology, and human ingenuity shaped the world’s unequal societies in his Pulitzer‑winning study of civilization and social evolution.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Thomas L. Friedman’s Pulitzer‑winning New York Times columnist explores how globalization, the integration of capital, technology, and information, reshapes world affairs, creating a single global market while sparking cultural backlash.

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.

WTF examines how emerging technologies—AI, algorithms and new organizational models—are reshaping business, work, and society in the near future.

Ruchir Sharma distills economics into ten practical rules, offering a guide to spotting the political, economic, and social shifts that shape everyday life in a rapidly changing world.

"Five years ago, Hernando de Soto and his research team closed their books and opened their eyes. They went into the streets of developing and former communist nations to learn what real people are achieving inside and outside the underground economy. Their findings are dramatic. The data they have collected demonstrate that the world's poor have accumulated all the assets needed for successful capitalism.". "Why then are these countries so underdeveloped? Why can't they turn these assets into liquid capital - the kind of capital that generates new wealth? De Soto reminds us that the present global crisis is the same kind of crisis that the advanced nations suffered during the Industrial Revolution, when they themselves were Third World countries teeming with black markets, pervasive mafias, widespread poverty and flagrant disregard of the law. The Western nations, he argues, created the key conversion process 150 years ago, and their Economies began to soar into wealth without their ever realizing what they had done. De Soto explains how this unwitting process, hidden deep in thousands of pieces of property law throughout the West, came to be, how it works, and how today it can be deliberately set up in developing and former communist nations."--BOOK JACKET.

This book attempts to show how technological change is generated and the processes by which improved technologies are introduced into economic activity. This is a far more complex process than it is often made out to be, largely because much of the reasoning and modelling of technological change hopelessly oversimplifies its component parts. The process of technological change takes a wide variety of forms so that propositions that might for instance be accurate when referring to the pharmaceutical industry are likely to be totally inappropriate when applied to the aircraft industry or to computers or forest products. Professor Rosenberg pays particular attention to the nature of the research process out of which new technologies have emerged. A central theme of the book is the idea that technological changes are often "path dependent" in the sense that their form and direction tend to be influenced strongly by the particular sequence of earlier events out of which a new technology has emerged. As a result, attempting to theorize about technologies without taking these factors into account is likely to fail to capture their most essential features. The book advances our understanding of technological change by explicitly recognizing its essential diversity and path-dependent nature. Individual chapters explore the particular features of new technologies in different historical and sectoral contexts.