Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Capital in the 21 Century by Thomas Piketty is quite long and dry as there are many facts and figures, but it's essential reading to understand that the United States' 1960s, where people could buy a home, car, got to college etc working a minimum wage job and where people often say they want to return to in the modern day, is instead an anomalous post war boom and that the level of wealth inequality today is actually the norm for most of modern history.

I found Capital in the 21st Century to be very readable and an interesting perspective.

At random Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, she makes you think. The Hard Thing About Hard Things - This is a great book about building businesses, and business in general. Capital in the 21st Century - One of the greatest books about economics and capital written ever - let alone in the last decade. The Intelligent Investor - This is Buffet's favourite book, and regardless of how many times I read it, I still learn more. One can never digest it in full. Predictably Irrational - This excellent tome makes behavioural economics digestible outside of economics. It's enlightening, though provoking, and turns several accepted truths on its head, purely by being written at all. Nexus (Ramez Naam) - This science fiction book explores transhumanism and would it could mean in the near future. It's both light and pulpy, but at the same time makes you think about the outcomes of technological progression.

I ploughed through Francis Fukuyama's Political Order series this year. I wouldn't say it's my favourite, but it was in some sense uplifting. He writes as though rule of law is a evolutionary certainty. As much as that's largely BS in my view, it's still nice to read. After 4 years I also finally finished Capital in the 21st Century. My opinion: worth reading by jumping around, not worth reading in linear fashion. Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu is worth a read too. It's well researched, but the author does occasionally blur the line between opinion and facts. I attribute it to writing styles. Similar in nature to another book I quite liked in the past - Wisdom Sits in Places, but less focused. Narrative Economics by Robert Shiller would be unfocused to people who are in the tech industry. Nonetheless, the book serves to give context to people who are textmining. Hopefully some changes to economics arise from this. His understanding of genetic algorithms and selection could do with some work.

Surprisingly, a lot of people in this thread hesitate to recommend Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". I'm not sure why this book is somehow surrounded with overblown controversy. I think it is an excellent book on historical economics. His conclusions are drawn from an extremely large dataset that is publicly available and downloadable here: https://www.quandl.com/data/PIKETTY It's by no means an Economics 101 book, but it should definitely be part of any economist's personal library in my opinion.

Why finance? Finance was the major viable option for people with your background but that's not the case anymore. Every industry needs people with your background -- more than ever! However, if you're hell bent on going into finance and you're going to read one economics book, read Thomas Piketty, "Capital for 21st Century". These are the classic economics tomes that you'd read over a lifetime: Karl Marx, "Capital" Adam Smith, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations" FA Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"

Picketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". If you have an interest in inequality of wealth and income, particularly how it has evolved over the last hundred years or so in some developed countries, it is certainly worth a read.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A truly outstanding economic research of the age. This book answer how and why inequality of wealth become part of our society and will continue to be... if we failed to change. One more impressive thing about this book is the massive amount of data used to proof the writer's thesis. He find and represent data of wealth from several countries over 200 years and present it neatly to support his idea. He also open those data for others to proof it as well.

Some titles I've recently read or at least have placed on my reading list. -------------------- Philosohpy Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium - Seneca Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (must read) The Republic - Plato -------------------- History Five Chimneys - Olga Lengyel The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (must read) The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank -------------------- Fiction (particularly dystopian) 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451 (crime/action) Child 44, The Secret Speech, Agent 6 - Tom Rob Smith -------------------- Economics Capital in the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Piketty Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty - Banerjee, Duflo Why Nations Fail - Robinson -------------------- Economics/Decision making/Psychology Undercover Economist, Freakonomics, Nudge, Thinking Fast and Slow -------------------- Random titles The Selfish Gene, Self-Reliance, The Elements of Style (about writing), Slaughterhouse-Five -------------------- Some links to inspire your reading (though you may want to checkout the websites first to get an idea of the topics they cover) http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books…