Chapter 27: Further Reading

This bibliography emphasizes works that articulate the strongest version of competing positions in economic policy. Readers using this chapter for adoption decisions, instructor preparation, or independent study should expect to find multiple perspectives represented across each major topic. Where a position is most fully articulated by a single thinker, the canonical text is given priority.

The role-of-government debate: foundational texts

Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Constitution of Liberty (1960). Hayek's central argument — that markets aggregate dispersed knowledge in a way central planning cannot — and his defense of a constitutional rule of law that constrains both private and public coercion. The starting point for serious classical-liberal economic thought.

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and (with Rose Friedman) Free to Choose (1980). Friedman's case for limited government in twelve concrete policy areas, including the negative-income-tax proposal (intellectual ancestor of the EITC) and school-choice arguments. More accessible than Hayek; equally important for understanding the conservative tradition.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). The foundational text of the Keynesian tradition, arguing that aggregate demand can fail and that government fiscal policy is a legitimate tool for managing it. Difficult to read in the original; many serviceable summaries exist.

Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power, and Profits (2019). Contemporary articulation of the progressive case, drawing on Stiglitz's Nobel-Prize work on information asymmetries. Pairs naturally with Mazzucato.

Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (2013, revised 2015). Argues that almost every major recent technology — touch screens, GPS, internet, mRNA vaccines — traces to public-sector R&D investment, complicating the "private creates / government redistributes" narrative.

Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments (2018). The contemporary growth-as-moral-imperative argument. Short, accessible, useful for paired reading with Stiglitz.

Glenn Hubbard, Healing Capitalism (2024) and various policy papers. Mainstream conservative public-finance economics from a former CEA chair.

Heather Boushey, Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It (2019). The progressive case that high inequality is not a side effect but a constraint on growth. Boushey served as chair of Biden's CEA.

Tax policy

Hall and Rabushka, The Flat Tax (revised 2007) — the classic flat-tax articulation. Diamond and Saez, "The Case for a Progressive Tax," JEP (2011) — contemporary academic case for high marginal rates on top incomes. Jason Furman, Brookings papers and Foreign Affairs (2018) on the TCJA's empirical record. Auten and Splinter, JPE (2024) — leading empirical challenge to the Piketty-Saez series; essential for measurement disputes. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) — the progressive treatise on long-run wealth concentration; pair with Auten-Splinter for methodological contestation.

Antitrust

Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox (1978, with subsequent editions). The canonical Chicago School text. Bork argues that the consumer-welfare standard is the only intellectually coherent reading of the antitrust statutes. Any reader hoping to engage seriously with neo-Brandeisian arguments must first encounter Bork in the original.

Lina Khan, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," Yale Law Journal 126 (2017): 710–805. Khan's law-school note, written before she became FTC chair, is the canonical neo-Brandeisian text. About 95 pages; essential.

Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (2018). Wu's broader historical and theoretical case; more accessible than Khan's note for general readers.

Carl Shapiro, "Antitrust in a Time of Populism," International Journal of Industrial Organization (2018). A serious internal critique of neo-Brandeisian theories from a respected antitrust economist who is sympathetic to some structural concerns.

Herbert Hovenkamp, Antitrust Law: An Analysis of Antitrust Principles and Their Application (multiple volumes, multiple editions). The standard antitrust treatise; the Hovenkamp essays in the Yale Law Journal responding to Khan are the most thorough doctrinal critique available.

Industrial policy

Dani Rodrik, "Industrial Policy: Don't Ask Why, Ask How" (2008) and subsequent writings — the contemporary case for "smart" industrial policy. Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane, Dani Rodrik, "The New Economics of Industrial Policy," Annual Review of Economics (2024) — the current academic state of the literature. Don Boudreaux, Café Hayek blog and Mercatus Center publications — libertarian skepticism of industrial policy.

Trade policy

Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism (1996) — Krugman's defense of free trade against protectionists from both left and right; essential for the pre-2016 consensus. Autor, Dorn, Hanson, "The China Shock," Annual Review of Economics (2016) — the paper that revised the consensus on trade's distributional effects. Amiti, Redding, Weinstein, "The Impact of the 2018 Tariffs on Prices and Welfare," JEP (2019) — the canonical empirical assessment of Trump 1 tariffs.

Macroeconomic policy and the Federal Reserve

Ben Bernanke, 21st Century Monetary Policy (2022) — the former Fed chair on central-bank tool evolution. Christina and David Romer, various papers on fiscal and monetary policy effectiveness. Jerome Powell, FOMC press conference transcripts (federalreserve.gov) — primary source for contemporary policy.

Inequality and mobility

Raj Chetty et al., Opportunity Insights project (opportunityinsights.org). The leading empirical work on intergenerational mobility. Charles Murray, Coming Apart (2012) and Robert Putnam, Our Kids (2015) — paired conservative- and liberal-leaning treatments of class divergence. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020), on rising mortality among working-age non-college-educated Americans.

Primary sources for instructors and students

The Tax Policy Center (taxpolicycenter.org), Joint Committee on Taxation (jct.gov), and Congressional Budget Office (cbo.gov) publish extensive primary materials on tax and fiscal policy. Steven Teles and Brink Lindsey, The Captured Economy (2017), is a useful cross-ideological treatment of regulatory capture and rent-seeking.

A note on balance: the works above are deliberately drawn from across the ideological spectrum. A reader who works through Hayek and Stiglitz, Bork and Khan, Friedman and Mazzucato will encounter the strongest arguments on each side of the major contemporary debates. The point of the bibliography is not to settle the questions but to ensure readers can engage them with full information.