2008. 1929. 1907. 1893. These dates strike fear into the heart of every investor. Panics, crashes, and bear markets have been part of the investing ecosystem for as long as markets have existed. Some say they are the price of progress – others, a flaw in the system. Whatever you think of periodic market crashes, they’re here to stay. But, …

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine 250 years ago, at a juncture between tyranny and freedom in his country, which is now ours. Once again, we are living through trying times if you are a lover of economic and political freedom, both of which are having a tough decade worldwide. Too many Americans are celebrating …

with Stephen C. SexauerJanuary 2026 (revised June 2026) Martin Daunton’s ambitious book, The Economic Government of the World, 1933–2023, is a sweeping account of how the modern world has tried to manage the global economy—an epic battle between global organizations trying to act as supra sovereigns and independent nation-states. It’s a battle that is shaping today’s economic and financial markets. …

What’s a book reviewer to do when one of his favorite writers – Steven Pinker, a great explainer of tough concepts in many different fields – produces a book that’s a snoozefest? Three things: (1) remind readers of Pinker’s better writing and thinking in other works; (2) indicate my reservations about his latest book, and (3) summarize the book anyway, …

FOREWORD Why aren’t we all rich? Equity markets have delivered stunning returns. A dollar invested in 1871 grew to more than $20,000 in real terms by 2025. In real terms. In nominal terms, it is, to quote the jazz standard, “How High the Moon.” That dollar would now be worth half a million. Surely somebody’s great-grandparents invested in the US …

I was tickled pink, to revive an old-fashioned expression, when I found out that Joel Mokyr, the celebrated Northwestern University economic historian, had won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics. He won it “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress,” said the Nobel committee. (He shared the prize with two other scholars who also specialized in …

With Stephen Sexauer How is the global economy governed? By whom and for what ends? What’s next? Martin Daunton’s ambitious book, The Economic Government of the World 1933–2023, starts at a world economic conference in London in 1933, with a battered world picking up the pieces resulting from the human, economic, and financial catastrophes tied to the First World War …

What can investors learn from ancient history? How about Muslim history, or the Song Dynasty of China (960 AD-1279 AD), or the Italian Renaissance and the Dutch Republic? In his new book, Peak Human, Johan Norberg, “a superstar of the global freedom movement” and author of the bestselling books Progress and The Capitalist Manifesto (both reviewed by me in this …

In my 2019 book, Fewer, Richer, Greener, I wrote: I [had] read Ben Wattenberg’s book, Fewer, his elegy for the population explosion. Showing that the explosion was effectively finished in the developed world and quickly coming to an end in the rest of the world, Wattenberg wrote in funereal tones, lamenting the end of an age of youth, exuberance, and …

Why is the U.S. dollar, which has lost more than 97% of its value since 1913, the dominant currency in the world? Is that status endangered, and what happens if the dollar loses its global reserve currency status? How bad is it for the U.S. government to have so much debt? Should we worry about inflation? How should we act …

FOREWORD THE IBBOTSON-SINQUEFIELD AND JEREMY SIEGEL STUDIES The quest to understand how different asset classes have performed over time, and what that means for the future, was powerfully advanced by Roger Ibbotson and Rex Sinquefield’s twin 1976 papers on “Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation.” The first paper was a reconstruction of historical returns on those asset classes starting in 1926, …

Are we experiencing an energy transition? According to the geologist and fund manager, Jane Woodward, we are – and it’s proceeding more quickly than almost anyone expected. In a dazzling speech Woodward gave at the semiannual conference of Foundation Financial Officers Group (FFOG) in April in Oceanside, California, she set forth a blizzard of facts supporting the idea that renewable …

I love “little books.” I don’t just mean those that are short or physically small. I’m referring to a genre that introduces general readers, including the young, to a topic using plain language and abundant charm. While many readers first encountered this genre with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, I’m even fonder of Ernst Gombrich’s 1936 masterpiece, A …

Why are some societies Western, Educated, Individualistic, Rich, and Democratic (“WEIRD”) while others are the opposite? Why are some nations rich and others poor? Why are some societies expansive, placing trust in strangers, building lasting institutions that rely on impersonal relationships, and fostering invention and creativity — while others, more inward-facing, preserve costly and unproductive old ways and favor family …

The urbanist and economist Edward Glaeser called cities “man’s greatest invention,” but cities have hit a bit of a rough patch lately. Why are cities so important to human life? What has gone wrong with them? And what can we do to make urban life better? In a new book, Age of the City, Ian Goldin, a South African professor …

Last week, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity,” according to the Nobel committee. The prizewinners’ work is laudable and important because economics is downstream of political and moral philosophy. That is where economics originated in Adam Smith’s day. Smith’s first major work, …

Sand. Salt. Iron. Copper. Oil. Lithium. These, not petabytes or algorithms or ideas, are the building blocks of human life as we know it. At least that’s what Ed Conway, author of Material World, tells us. And, without these basic materials, we couldn’t have much of anything else, certainly not petabytes of information or algorithms for manipulating them. Materials science …

To get a mental picture of The New World Economy in 5 Trends, imagine an architectural folly, a structure that’s sturdy at its base but with turrets, parapets, gables, and gargoyles on top. Now, instead of a building, think about a book that has two authors but that is not co-authored in the usual way — instead, the two take …