Reading list
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A suggested path, beginner to advanced
5 steps · 25 worksShort, entertaining pieces that teach the core habit: follow a policy past its first, visible effect.
- 1.1I, PencilLeonard E. Read · 1958 · ~10 min
- 1.2That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not SeenFrédéric Bastiat · 1850 · ~50 pp
- 1.3A Petition (of the Candlemakers)Frédéric Bastiat · 1845 · ~5 min
- 1.4Fear the Boom and Bust (Keynes vs. Hayek rap)John Papola & Russ Roberts · 2010 · ~7 min
- 1.5Economics in One LessonHenry Hazlitt · 1946 · ~200 pp
Three centuries on one line
Publication timeline
116 of 116 match the filtersThe list
- I, PencilLeonard E. Read · 1958
A pencil tells its family tree: no single person on earth knows how to make it. The friendliest introduction to spontaneous order there is.
read free ↗em português: Eu, o Lápis - That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not SeenFrédéric Bastiat · 1850
The broken window and eleven other cases of judging a policy only by its visible effects. The habit of mind behind every chapter of this site.
read free ↗em português: O que se vê e o que não se vê - A Petition (of the Candlemakers)Frédéric Bastiat · 1845
Candle makers petition parliament for protection against unfair competition from the sun. The best five-minute case against tariffs ever written.
- Fear the Boom and Bust (Keynes vs. Hayek rap)John Papola & Russ Roberts · 2010
Keynes and Hayek debate the business cycle as a rap battle. Surprisingly accurate, and the fastest way to see the Austrian vs Keynesian dispute.
- Economics in One LessonHenry Hazlitt · 1946
Bastiat's broken window applied to 20th-century policy: look at long-run effects on all groups, not just short-run effects on one. The classic first economics book.
em português: Economia numa Única Lição - Basic EconomicsThomas Sowell · 2000
A citizen's guide to economics with no graphs or equations: prices, rent control, minimum wages, trade, banking. Long, but each chapter stands alone.
em português: Economia Básica - Free to Choose (TV series)Milton Friedman · 1980
Ten PBS episodes filmed on location around the world, each followed by a debate with critics. Episode 1, 'The Power of the Market', is the place to start.
- Capitalism and FreedomMilton Friedman · 1962
Economic freedom as a condition of political freedom, plus concrete proposals: school vouchers, a negative income tax, floating exchange rates, ending licensure and the draft.
em português: Capitalismo e Liberdade - What Has Government Done to Our Money?Murray N. Rothbard · 1963
How money emerges from barter, why gold, and how governments debased it step by step until fiat. The clearest short book on money from the Austrian side.
em português: O que o Governo Fez com o Nosso Dinheiro? - Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and TomorrowLudwig von Mises · 1979
Six lectures given in Buenos Aires in 1959 on capitalism, socialism, interventionism, inflation, foreign investment and ideas. The gentlest door into Mises, and a best-seller in Brazil.
em português: As Seis Lições - The Use of Knowledge in SocietyF. A. Hayek · 1945
The single most important essay on this list: knowledge is dispersed, local and tacit, and prices are a system for communicating it. The tin example will stay with you.
- The Road to SerfdomF. A. Hayek · 1944
Central planning needs agreement on ends that does not exist, so it drifts toward coercion and 'the worst get on top'. Dedicated 'to the socialists of all parties'.
em português: O Caminho da Servidão - A Conflict of VisionsThomas Sowell · 1987
Behind most political disagreements are two visions of human nature: 'constrained' (trade-offs, processes) and 'unconstrained' (solutions, results). Fair to both sides.
em português: Conflito de Visões - The LawFrédéric Bastiat · 1850
Law exists to protect person, liberty and property; when it is used to take from some for others it becomes 'legal plunder'. A pamphlet you can finish in an evening.
read free ↗em português: A Lei - The Rational OptimistMatt Ridley · 2010
Prosperity comes from exchange and specialization, ideas 'having sex'. A lively history from hand axes to the internet.
em português: O Otimista Racional - On LibertyJohn Stuart Mill · 1859
The harm principle, freedom of thought and discussion, and individuality against the pressure of custom. Short, clear, still argued over.
read free ↗em português: Sobre a Liberdade - The Myth of the Rational VoterBryan Caplan · 2007
Voters aren't just ignorant, they're systematically biased (anti-market, anti-foreign, make-work, pessimistic), and since a vote costs nothing, they indulge the bias.
- Governing the CommonsElinor Ostrom · 1990
Swiss pastures, Japanese forests, Spanish huertas, Philippine irrigation: communities managing common resources for centuries without either privatization or the state. Her eight design principles.
- Why Nations FailDaron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson · 2012
Inclusive vs extractive institutions, from the two Nogaleses to North and South Korea. Not written from a liberal-school perspective, but strongly in its spirit on property and rule of law.
em português: Por que as Nações Fracassam - The Wealth of NationsAdam Smith · 1776
Division of labor, the extent of the market, the invisible hand and the long attack on mercantilist privilege. Book I and Book IV are the core.
read free ↗em português: A Riqueza das Nações - Human ActionLudwig von Mises · 1949
Mises' treatise: praxeology, subjective value, monetary calculation, interest, the trade cycle and the market process. Daunting, but the reference work of the school.
read free ↗em português: Ação Humana - The Constitution of LibertyF. A. Hayek · 1960
Hayek's positive case for liberty under the rule of law: general, abstract rules instead of discretionary commands, and what that means for the welfare state.
em português: Os Fundamentos da Liberdade - Anarchy, State, and UtopiaRobert Nozick · 1974
Rights as side constraints, the minimal state arising without violating rights, the entitlement theory of justice and the Wilt Chamberlain argument against Rawls.
- Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern WorldDeirdre N. McCloskey · 2010
Vol. 2: one by one, the material explanations of the Great Enrichment (coal, empire, saving, institutions) fall short; what changed was how people talked about trade and innovation.
- Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World EconomyPBS (from Yergin & Stanislaw) · 2002
A documentary history of the 20th century as a contest between Keynes and Hayek, planning and markets, with interviews of policymakers and economists from around the world.
- EconTalk (podcast)Russ Roberts · 2006
Weekly long conversations with economists and writers since 2006: Munger, McCloskey, Boettke and hundreds more.
- 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 MinutesHans Rosling (BBC) · 2010
Rosling's animated bubble chart of health and wealth since 1810: the Great Enrichment in one take.
- Fight of the Century (Keynes vs. Hayek, round two)John Papola & Russ Roberts · 2011
The sequel rap, set after the 2008 crisis: stimulus, the knowledge problem and who gets to plan.
- Why I Am Not a ConservativeF. A. Hayek · 1960
The postscript to The Constitution of Liberty: liberals welcome change and spontaneous order; conservatives fear the new and like authority. Clarifies where liberalism sits.
- Anatomy of the StateMurray N. Rothbard · 1965
The state as the organization of the 'political means' to wealth, and how it wins legitimacy through court intellectuals. Rothbard at his most radical and concise.
read free ↗em português: A Anatomia do Estado - The Tragedy of the CommonsGarrett Hardin · 1968
Open-access resources get overused because each user bears only a fraction of the cost. Read it before Ostrom, who showed communities often escape the tragedy.
- The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its ProfitsMilton Friedman · 1970
The New York Times Magazine essay behind the 'Friedman doctrine': executives spending shareholders' money on social causes are imposing taxes without accountability.
- The Lighthouse in EconomicsRonald H. Coase · 1974
The textbook example of a public good turns out to have been privately built and financed in Britain for centuries. A lesson in checking the facts.
- Betting on the PlanetJohn Tierney · 1990
The New York Times Magazine story of the Simon–Ehrlich wager: five metals, ten years, and the optimist won.
- Ricardo's Difficult IdeaPaul Krugman · 1996
A mainstream (and non-libertarian) economist on why comparative advantage is both true and widely misunderstood, even by intellectuals. Good on why the idea feels wrong.
- Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?Robert Nozick · 1998
School rewards verbal skill; the market doesn't in the same way. Nozick's hypothesis about why wordsmiths resent the system.
- Economic SophismsFrédéric Bastiat · 1845
Short, funny demolitions of protectionist arguments (two series, 1845 and 1848). The Candlemakers' Petition and the 'negative railroad' are here.
em português: Sofismas Econômicos - LiberalismLudwig von Mises · 1927
Mises' short program for classical liberalism: property, peace, free trade and limited government, written for a general reader in interwar Vienna.
em português: Liberalismo - The Anti-Capitalistic MentalityLudwig von Mises · 1956
Why a system that served the masses so well is resented, especially by intellectuals: a short, sharp essay in social psychology.
em português: A Mentalidade Anticapitalista - Free to ChooseMilton & Rose Friedman · 1980
The book of the TV series: markets, welfare, schools, consumer protection, inflation and the 'tide' turning toward liberty. The most accessible Friedman.
em português: Livre para Escolher - Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary HistoryMilton Friedman · 1992
Stone money of Yap, bimetallism, the silver purchase that wrecked China, and why 'inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon'.
- The Mystery of CapitalHernando de Soto · 2000
The poor own trillions in assets they can't use as collateral because they lack formal title: 'dead capital'. Based on fieldwork in Lima, Cairo, Manila and elsewhere.
em português: O Mistério do Capital - Economic Facts and FallaciesThomas Sowell · 2008
Urban, gender, academic, income and race fallacies taken apart one statistic at a time.
em português: Fatos e Falácias da Economia - The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and ProsperityRussell Roberts · 2008
A novel about a Stanford student, a price-gouging controversy and emergent order. Economics by story for people who would never open a treatise.
- Public Choice: A PrimerEamonn Butler · 2012
A short, plain-language introduction to voting, lobbying, bureaucracy and rent-seeking (Institute of Economic Affairs).
- How Adam Smith Can Change Your LifeRuss Roberts · 2014
A warm, short guide to The Theory of Moral Sentiments: self-interest, self-deception, being lovely, and the moral sources of a market society.
- Classical Liberalism: A PrimerEamonn Butler · 2015
Core ideas, key thinkers and the main criticisms of classical liberalism, in under 200 pages (Institute of Economic Affairs).
- Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the FutureJohan Norberg · 2016
Food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, environment, literacy, freedom, equality, the next generation: the data on how much better things have become.
em português: Progresso - Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why It MattersJesse Norman · 2018
A biography and reassessment that rescues Smith from both his fans and his critics; good on the moral philosophy and the man.
- Enlightenment NowSteven Pinker · 2018
Reason, science and humanism, defended chapter by chapter with data on health, wealth, peace and safety.
- Why Liberalism WorksDeirdre N. McCloskey · 2019
Short essays making the case for 'humane true liberalism': let people have a go, and the result is the Great Enrichment. The trilogy's argument made accessible.
- A Letter Concerning TolerationJohn Locke · 1689
Locke's case that the magistrate has no business saving souls by force; the root of the separation of church and state.
- Of the Balance of TradeDavid Hume · 1752
The price–specie–flow argument: hoarding gold through trade surpluses defeats itself. The short essay that dismantled mercantilism before Smith.
- The Nature of the FirmRonald H. Coase · 1937
If markets coordinate so well, why do firms exist? Because using the price mechanism has costs; firms grow until internal organizing costs match market transaction costs.
- Toward a Theory of Property RightsHarold Demsetz · 1967
Property rights emerge when the gains from internalizing externalities exceed the costs, as with beaver hunting among the Montagnais once the fur trade arrived.
- The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and TheftGordon Tullock · 1967
The cost of a monopoly or tariff is not just the deadweight triangle but the resources spent fighting to get it. The birth of rent-seeking theory.
- The Theory of Economic RegulationGeorge J. Stigler · 1971
Regulation is usually acquired by the industry and designed for its benefit. The 'capture' theory, with evidence from trucking and occupational licensing.
- The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the ModernsBenjamin Constant · 1819
A lecture in Paris contrasting collective self-rule (ancient liberty) with private independence (modern liberty), and warning against sacrificing the second for the first.
- Two Concepts of LibertyIsaiah Berlin · 1958
Berlin's Oxford inaugural lecture: negative liberty (freedom from interference) vs positive liberty (self-mastery), and how the latter has been used to justify coercion.
- Competition as a Discovery ProcedureF. A. Hayek · 1968
A Kiel lecture: competition is valuable precisely because we don't know the outcome in advance; it's how we find out what is cheap, wanted and possible.
- The Pretence of KnowledgeF. A. Hayek · 1974
Hayek's Nobel lecture: economists who imitate physics claim precision about complex phenomena that they cannot have, with dangerous policy results.
- The Process and Progress of EconomicsGeorge J. Stigler · 1982
Stigler's Nobel lecture on how economics advances, including the information and regulation research that won him the prize.
- The Constitution of Economic PolicyJames M. Buchanan · 1986
Buchanan's Nobel lecture: reform the rules of the game, not the plays; politics as exchange; and Wicksell's unanimity as a benchmark.
- The Institutional Structure of ProductionRonald H. Coase · 1991
Coase's Nobel lecture, looking back on why transaction costs and property rights belong at the center of economics.
- Economic Performance through TimeDouglass C. North · 1993
North's Nobel lecture: neoclassical theory needs institutions and time added to explain why some economies grow and others stagnate.
- Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic SystemsElinor Ostrom · 2009
Ostrom's Nobel lecture: decades of fieldwork and lab experiments on how people craft rules to govern shared resources at many levels at once.
- Democracy in AmericaAlexis de Tocqueville · 1835
A French aristocrat studies American self-government: civil associations, local institutions, and the 'tyranny of the majority' and soft despotism that threaten democracy.
read free ↗em português: A Democracia na América - Capitalism, Socialism and DemocracyJoseph A. Schumpeter · 1942
Creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism; Schumpeter predicted it would be undone not by failure but by its own success. Chapters 7–8 are the famous ones.
em português: Capitalismo, Socialismo e Democracia - BureaucracyLudwig von Mises · 1944
Why a government office cannot be run like a business: without profit and loss, management has to be by rules rather than results.
- Individualism and Economic OrderF. A. Hayek · 1948
Collects 'Economics and Knowledge', 'The Use of Knowledge in Society', 'The Meaning of Competition' and Hayek's essays on the calculation debate.
- America's Great DepressionMurray N. Rothbard · 1963
The Austrian reading of 1929: Fed credit expansion in the 1920s caused the boom, and Hoover's interventions prolonged the bust. Read alongside Friedman & Schwartz for the contrast.
- The Logic of Collective ActionMancur Olson · 1965
Large groups with diffuse interests struggle to organize while small groups with concentrated interests lobby well. Explains why sugar quotas survive.
- For a New Liberty: The Libertarian ManifestoMurray N. Rothbard · 1973
The non-aggression axiom applied to everything: taxes, roads, police, courts, education, war. The founding manifesto of modern anarcho-capitalism.
- Denationalisation of MoneyF. A. Hayek · 1976
Abolish the government monopoly on money and let private currencies compete for stability. Often cited as an intellectual precursor of crypto.
- Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord KeynesJames M. Buchanan & Richard E. Wagner · 1977
Once balanced budgets stopped being a moral rule, politicians found deficits irresistible: spending is seen, its cost is pushed onto future taxpayers.
- Knowledge and DecisionsThomas Sowell · 1980
Hayek's knowledge problem applied to institutions: who decides, with what feedback, and at what cost of being wrong.
- The Ultimate ResourceJulian L. Simon · 1981
Long-run prices of raw materials fall because human ingenuity, the ultimate resource, finds substitutes. The data-heavy case against resource doom.
- The Rise and Decline of NationsMancur Olson · 1982
Stable societies accumulate distributional coalitions that slow growth; why postwar Germany and Japan, their lobbies wiped out, grew faster than Britain.
- The Mystery of BankingMurray N. Rothbard · 1983
T-account by T-account: how fractional-reserve banks create money and how central banks manage the process. The mechanics behind the business-cycle chapter.
- The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of SocialismF. A. Hayek · 1988
Hayek's last book (edited by W. W. Bartley III): morals of property and trade evolved culturally and made the extended order possible; reason cannot redesign them.
- The Vision of the AnointedThomas Sowell · 1995
How a policy elite insulates its beliefs from evidence: crisis, solution, results ignored. Sharp and polemical; pairs with A Conflict of Visions.
- Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and PracticeTom G. Palmer · 2009
Essays on rights, the history of liberty, civil society and globalization. Good for seeing the philosophical and historical sides of liberalism together.
- A Brief History of LibertyDavid Schmidtz & Jason Brennan · 2010
Liberty's career as idea and practice: rule of law, freedom of commerce, religion, speech, and freedom from want. Even-handed and short.
- Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and TomorrowPeter J. Boettke · 2012
Boettke on 'mainline' economics from Smith to Hayek, Buchanan and Ostrom: why it matters, and how to teach it.
- The Problem of Political AuthorityMichael Huemer · 2013
Does the state have a moral right to command us that no individual would? Huemer argues no, then sketches how a society without one might work. Rigorous analytic philosophy.
- Wealth, Poverty and PoliticsThomas Sowell · 2015
Geography, culture and institutions as causes of unequal outcomes between nations and groups. Sowell's synthesis of decades of work.
- F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social PhilosophyPeter J. Boettke · 2018
A guided tour of Hayek's whole project, from cycles and the calculation debate to law and epistemics, by a leading modern Austrian.
- SuperabundanceMarian L. Tupy & Gale L. Pooley · 2022
Updates Julian Simon with 'time prices': hours of work needed to buy hundreds of commodities, which keep falling as population grows.
- Economic Calculation in the Socialist CommonwealthLudwig von Mises · 1920
Without private ownership of the means of production there are no market prices for capital goods, so planners cannot tell which uses are economical. Launched the socialist calculation debate.
em português: O Cálculo Econômico sob o Socialismo - Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic TheoryArmen A. Alchian · 1950
Firms needn't maximize consciously: under competition, profit-and-loss selects the ones that happen to do well. A Darwinian foundation for price theory.
- The Methodology of Positive EconomicsMilton Friedman · 1953
Judge a theory by its predictions, not by the 'realism' of its assumptions. The most cited (and disputed) methodology essay in economics; the Austrians reject it.
- The Role of Monetary PolicyMilton Friedman · 1968
His AEA presidential address: there is no permanent trade-off between inflation and unemployment; the 'natural rate' and expectations. Vindicated by the 1970s.
- Entrepreneurial Discovery and the Competitive Market Process: An Austrian ApproachIsrael M. Kirzner · 1997
Kirzner's own survey of the entrepreneurial-discovery view of markets, written for the Journal of Economic Literature.
- Inflation and UnemploymentMilton Friedman · 1976
Friedman's Nobel lecture: the vertical long-run Phillips curve and the possibility that higher inflation raises unemployment by making prices noisier.
- Two Treatises of GovernmentJohn Locke · 1689
The founding text of natural rights, property from labor and government by consent. Read the Second Treatise first; the First is a line-by-line rebuttal of Filmer.
read free ↗em português: Dois Tratados sobre o Governo - The Theory of Moral SentimentsAdam Smith · 1759
Smith's first book: sympathy, the impartial spectator and how moral norms emerge between people. Essential for seeing that Smith was no apostle of greed.
read free ↗em português: Teoria dos Sentimentos Morais - On the Principles of Political Economy and TaxationDavid Ricardo · 1817
Comparative advantage (chapter 7, the wine-and-cloth example), differential rent and the corn-law debate, in Ricardo's dense deductive style.
- Principles of EconomicsCarl Menger · 1871
The founding book of the Austrian school and one leg of the marginal revolution: value is subjective, goods are ordered by their distance from consumption.
- The Theory of Money and CreditLudwig von Mises · 1912
Applies marginal utility to money (the regression theorem) and sketches the credit-expansion theory of the business cycle.
- Prices and ProductionF. A. Hayek · 1931
Hayek's LSE lectures on how credit expansion distorts the structure of production (the 'Hayekian triangle'). The technical side of the Austrian cycle theory.
- The Open Society and Its EnemiesKarl Popper · 1945
A wartime assault on Plato, Hegel and Marx and their 'historicism'; the case for piecemeal social engineering and institutions that let us remove rulers without bloodshed.
em português: A Sociedade Aberta e Seus Inimigos - An Economic Theory of DemocracyAnthony Downs · 1957
Parties as vote-maximizers, the median voter, and rational ignorance: why informing yourself about politics rarely pays.
- Man, Economy, and StateMurray N. Rothbard · 1962
A systematic Austrian treatise built step by step from the logic of action, ending (in Power and Market) with a taxonomy of government intervention.
- The Calculus of ConsentJames M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock · 1962
Founding text of public choice and constitutional economics: model politicians and voters as self-interested, then ask which decision rules people would agree to in advance.
- A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960Milton Friedman & Anna J. Schwartz · 1963
A century of data showing money matters; chapter 7, 'The Great Contraction', blames the Fed for letting the money supply collapse after 1929.
- Law, Legislation and LibertyF. A. Hayek · 1973
Spontaneous order (cosmos) vs made order (taxis), law vs legislation, the 'mirage of social justice', and a proposed model constitution.
- Competition and EntrepreneurshipIsrael M. Kirzner · 1973
The entrepreneur as someone alert to unnoticed profit opportunities, whose discoveries push markets toward coordination. The modern Austrian theory of the market process.
- The Ethics of LibertyMurray N. Rothbard · 1982
Rothbard's natural-law foundation for libertarian rights, from self-ownership and homesteading to punishment, children and the state.
- The Firm, the Market, and the LawRonald H. Coase · 1988
Coase's key papers ('Nature of the Firm', 'Social Cost', 'The Marginal Cost Controversy') with a new introduction on what they were for.
- Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic PerformanceDouglass C. North · 1990
Institutions are 'the rules of the game'; formal rules, informal norms and enforcement shape transaction costs and so the long-run paths of nations.
- The Bourgeois VirtuesDeirdre N. McCloskey · 2006
Vol. 1 of the Bourgeois Era trilogy: commercial life is compatible with, and even nurtures, prudence, justice, courage, faith, hope and love.
- Bourgeois EqualityDeirdre N. McCloskey · 2016
Vol. 3: ideas, not capital, enriched the world. Liberty and dignity for ordinary innovators, the 'Bourgeois Deal', produced a 3,000% rise in real income.
- A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern EconomyJoel Mokyr · 2016
A 'market for ideas' among Europe's competing states and the Republic of Letters made the Industrial Enlightenment possible.
Free links point to Project Gutenberg, the Nobel Foundation, the Mises Institute, FEE, Econlib, bastiat.org and official video channels. Portuguese titles are the commonly used translations; editions from LVM, the Instituto Mises Brasil and others vary.