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The Worldly Philosophers isn't particularly technical, but it is an excellent introduction to the big theorists of political economy from Smith to Keynes. I highly recommend giving it a read, and it would complement nicely with a book that was more technical and more focused on the 20th/21st centuries.

Edit: It's not exactly what you're looking for, but Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century interlaces the intellectual history in with the more straight up history of capitalism, although as the title suggests it is a lot more focused on macro.

Here is a another historical document about the New York Clearinghouse:

https://archive.org/stream/layingofcornerst00newy#page/10/mode/2up

On page 11, it even details the NYCH as acting as a lender of last resort in which it issued "Clearing House Certificates" to the Metropolitan Bank during a bank run to keep that bank solvent.

"Good Economics for Hard Times" by Banerjee & Duflo were able to convince me that protectionism isn't as bad as I expected. If the US would stop trading with everyone, the book predicted a 2-3% decrease in GDP, so about one year of lost growth. I'm still an advocate of free trade, but the issue is the benefits of free trade are not being properly allocated to the losers of free trade. This has happened time and time again, and without governmental assistance will continue.

I highly recommend checking out the book, it was very well thought out.

Good Economics for Hard Times https://www.amazon.com/dp/1610399501/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_JSHM68VJFRP6QWZ9A2BJ

This book is written by several economists. It doesn’t contain many data tables on price trends but it does explore the question of whether firms abuse pricing power to attain or maintain market dominance from Duke Tobacco and Standard Oil up through IBM and mid-90s.

But it used, don’t buy the $85 kindle version 😂. I really enjoyed it for what it’s worth. Gave a lot of detail that I haven’t seen other places on the companies it covers.

Here’s a list of BRAC closures — you could see if any of these correlate with a local economic downturn when the closure happened:

https://www.epa.gov/fedfac/base-realignment-and-closure-brac-sites-state

I’m not sure if this book gets into specifics but it could be in the ballpark of what you’re looking for:

https://www.amazon.com/Salvaging-Community-American-Rebuild-Military/dp/1501700065/

Two economists, one of them a communist Nobel prize laureate who was married to a black woman , exhaustively studied historical records and came to the conclusion that in the South slaves received the same food and medical care as free whites, and 90% of the income they produced, and, in fact, that slaves in the South were paid more than many free white workers in the North.

They obviously disapproved of slavery on moral grounds, but found that it was economically efficient. Their research - which is almost universally respected as reliable - contradicts almost everything you claim. Before you tell a Nobel prize economist that he’s wrong, I want to see data.

The book has 360 pages and can be bought on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Cross-Economics-American-Slavery/dp/0393312186

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_on_the_Cross

> Robert Brenner's Economics of Global Turbulence

...

> [Bringing together the strengths of both the economist and the historian, Robert Brenner rises to this challenge. In this work, a revised and newly introduced edition of his acclaimed New Left Review special report, he charts the turbulent post-war history of the global system and unearths the mechanisms of over-production and over-competition which lie behind its long-term crisis since the early 1970s, thereby demonstrating the thoroughly systematic factors behind wage repression, high unemployment and unequal development, and raising disturbing and far-reaching questions about its future trajectory.)(https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Global-Turbulence-Robert-Brenner/dp/1859847307)

I'm not going to lie, "The other side is full of blinded ideologues, so here is a recommendation from a blinded ideologue on my side instead", is not a good look.

In addition to the Bernanke books mentioned by others, another Fed economist, Robert Hetzel, wrote a very good book that puts the Great Recession into a longer term perspective. It's a good book to read prior to diving in on the details of specific industries as it focuses on the macro side of things that can help to frame smaller scale outcomes as part of a coherent whole.

If anyone sees this article and thinks, "Huh, that's neat", this is a fairly up to date, high quality book that covers the entire topic of the economic history of China from 'antiquity to the nineteenth century', as the tagline says. I highly, highly recommend it.

Suggest a read of the late David Graeber's book Debt: the First 5000 Years, probably the most important book on Economics in at least the last 15-20 years.. Graeber argues that it's not so much about the style of economic system, but power relationships. One more thing, anthropologists have known for quite some time that true barter was never used as a serious, long-term medium-of-exchange, ever - yet, Economics books continue to perpetuate the myth that barter was "first".

This would be a good book to grab, if you have the spare cash. The first article contained in, especially (A Fiscal Theory of Government's Role in Money), has some commentary on the shortcomings of private 'outside' monies, such as suggested by Hayek in Denationalization of Money.

I just finished The Midas Paradox recently. Very good treatment of this from an original perspective (rather than just the international gold standard broadly, looking at things from the perspective and with a model based on the international gold market).

Highly recommend.

Lol. Have you actually read Wealth of Nations? It is not what it is hyped up to be by a longshot.

So yes.

However, this is just my reading list ATM it's not the whole shebang of thought.

To be fair you need to read both sides and this is a great book that gets into that.

"Keynes VS Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics" by Nicholas Wapshott

A good counter to Krugman would be any book that talks about the Austrian school of economic thought.

Keynes VS Hayek

Another fantastic book that is not on the list but gives a firm foundation as to what, when, why, where and how when it comes to socioeconomic thought is:

Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Second Edition 2nd Edition, Ken Morrison

Marx, Durkheim, Weber 2nd Ed

>We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry in the Early Modern period

Crucial point is that medieval women workers are often ignored, yet Allen's argument seems to at least partially rely on them earning high wages relative to other (male-dominated) industries. Yet this ignores a large medievalist literature finding that, whenever women did work outside of the home back then, it was in low status, low wage work in low profit industries. Did the spinning industry mostly employ women and children at this time?

Loosely related is Judith Bennett's famous concept of patriarchal equilibrium. Despite any absolute gains in material well-being, medieval women's status relative to men's remained the same. So an industry dominated by women would be expected to be low-paid relative to male-dominated ones. If spinning and other industries which industrialized were female-dominated, then Allen's high wage economy idea doesn't fly.

This was just my initial thought when I read your post. Don't know if it's relevant.

https://www.amazon.com/Pocket-Piketty-Capital-Twenty-First-Century/dp/1944869352

Here's the short version, available in English. Jesper Roine, the author, was a professor of mine, and I can highly recommend the book (not necessarily as a substitute to Piketty's but as a complement or gateway book!)

It's important to distinguish between education and training.

Education is an assimilating funciton, whether that be to connect the upper classes to each other to act as effective gatekeepers, or "civilize" the lower classes.

Training however is what we associate positively with education.

Randall Collins outlines in <em>The Credential Society: A Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification</em> that primary schools served to instill Anglo-Protestant values onto immigrants and the working class of the U.S., while universities served a "credential" function. Before the Civil War and the Morill Act (the Land Grant universities bill), everyone from medicine to crafting got their training from personal connections, and those networks were better validators of experience and prestiege. The public routinely criticized it for "not being useful", with administering "the classics" when skills and vocations is what they wanted. Then came the influx of immigration and the established professional networks (law, medicine, science, etc). and the universities sought an alliance with universities to act as filter.

> No, gold standard was inherently unstable, and boom and recession cycles were happening all the time for entire existence of gold standard economy.

It's a bit more complicated than that. The international gold standard locked countries into the monetary trilemma: the point of the gold standard was fixed exchange rates and free capital flow, so the third leg of the trilemma -- independent domestic monetary policy -- got knocked out. So, as you say, it exposed countries to random external forces, but one of those forces could be foreign central banks transmitting their policy through the gold standard. For example, the Bank of England created the recession surrounding the Panic of 1907 (and probably the Panic itself, possibly through a copper commodity price channel) when it tightened policy in response to an external gold drain as London based insurers paid out on insurance polices following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

This is why people talk about, for example, the Bank of France following a contractionary policy during the early 1930's as a contributing cause of the Great Contraction. In fact, one of the better recent books on the Great Depression, Scott Sumner's Midas Paradox, conceptualizes the whole Great Contraction as a series of shifts in the gold/currency ratio of the world.

So, yes, the gold standard was vulnerable to the transmission of monetary shocks from international sources, but central banks could definitely be some of these sources. And the Fed definitely did contribute to making the Great Depression so great and was doing so intentionally (initially, they were trying to deflate the asset bubble on the stock market or, as they thought of it, fight speculation), not fully aware of the secondary consequences of their actions (and not understanding the policy tools available to them well enough to use them effectively).

That's like four different fields, but War! what is it good for was interesting. In the classic polisci vein of "war made the state, and the state made war." Talks a bit about the econ side of things, insofar as the econ side of things developed to help the state conduct war.

> I take it you've read Eichengreen's "Golden Fetters" for 29?

Of course, I consider it the canonical answer, although I did find some REALLY good critique against BE in The Dollar Crisis by Duncan (He also tears apart Krugman so it's a definite page turner!).

> Just as Tooze's "Crashed" gave the international perspective on 2008.

Haven't read that one, I always found the best book on GFC to be Roubini's "Crisis Economics."

If you're interested, "America's Bank" is a very accessible history. Among other things, it points out that there were three separate Federal Reserve bills that were debated for well over a year before the final one passed.

link

I read this in college and loved it. Really entertaining read

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143116177/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_fabc_8dwZFb4ADXB6F

Silvio Gesell supported scrip, as did Irving Fisher. I have an idea for a type of scrip that could work today.

Ok cool, I take it these books are more micro orientated than macro? That would be nice, most of the books mentioned ITT seem to be more macroeconomic. Thanks for the recommendations!

Edit: Just to clarify, when you say Galbraith and Heilbroner, do you mean: Handbook on the History of Economic Analysis Volume III (although I guess volume I and II are good too) and The Worldly Philosophers?

Edit 2: Sorry, I mean History of Economics: The Past as the Present by Galbraith?

Pre-classical economic theory was based on the king acting as the moderator of the economy. It was the kings job to say what people should be doing. As the French Revolution brought new ideas about the world, pre-classical economists started seeing a different side of economics. The American colonies were becoming rich at this time, and economists could analyze trade data between these colonies along with the west indian colonies. Adam Smith then came along and put everything that these people were feeling into writing. The Wealth of Nations was born, the foundation for Classical Economics. Also see John Menard Keynes, he had a large part in defining what classical economics is.

Keynes? Classical? Keynes' work was explicitly a critique of Classical economics.

Also, Cantillon's and Hume's work are both considered part of Classical economics and predate The Wealth of Nations.