Here are some recent business titles that offer various insights into the current economic environment:
• “Winner Take All,” by Dambisa Moyo (Allen Lane/Basic). China has embarked on a “commodity crusade,” making it the pre-eminent buyer of resources ranging from metals to food, says the former Goldman Sachs banker. The result may be “famine, conflict and worse” for everyone else in the decades to come.
• “Paper Promises,” by Philip Coggan (Allen Lane/ PublicAffairs). Our Ponzi scheme “is running out of suckers,” the Economist’s Buttonwood columnist argues in this look at the West’s debt crisis.
• “The Power of Habit,” by Charles Duhigg (Heinemann/Random House). Dipping into neurological case studies, Duhigg explores how our brains form habits and how we can change them. Examples range from murderous sleepwalkers to Goldman Sachs.
•“Finance and the Good Society,” by Robert J. Shiller (Princeton). The influential Yale University economist argues that finance, for all its manifest failings of late, remains a force for good in society.
James Pressley, Bloomberg News
