This past year has been a rollercoaster full of political and economic surprises, with surely more on the way in 2025.
It’s not all gloom and doom: Along with inequality, climate crisis and other systemic woes, there were some authors who shed light on the path forward, with practical solutions and global trends we can be optimistic about along with a few fascinating technological and scientific breakthroughs we’ve witnessed.
Whether you’re looking for a last-minute gift or a thought-provoking read as we head into a new year, here are some options.
Capitalism is still the predominant game in town if you’re an advanced economy, but we’ve had no shortage of examples of its failings and why it may not be working for everyone.
In "What Went Wrong with Capitalism," Ruchir Sharma charts the rise of the so-called “big government,” oligopolies and the type of economic system that is set up to benefit the billionaire class.
This is the right time for soul-searching: The number of people who expect to be “better in five years” hit a record low in 2023 in 14 of the advanced countries, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer quoted in the book. In the U.S., where Sharma argues the “decline is most jarring,”inequality figures continued to deteriorate in 2024. The U.S. is down in terms of economic freedom rangings from fourth place in 2000s to 25th globally, according to the Heritage Foundation.
While many politicians and authors have made similar claims, the fact that these ideas come from someone from the financial industry — Sharma is chairman of Rockefeller International and chief investment officer of Breakout Capital — gives his arguments additional weight.
“Capitalism is the economic soulmate of democracy, equally fair and flawed,” he establishes early in the book. “With the partial exception of tiny Singapore, no wealthy, developed economy is not a fully formed democracy. And no centralized autocracy has ever grown rich in the modern era.”
The book contrasts America’s capitalist woes with the rest of the world’s financial crises, takes a look at the latest fiscal policies and offers a critique of “Bidenomics.”
Ultimately, Sharma argues in favor of rethinking outdated models of economic policymaking and interventionism.
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“Governments and central banks face few objections, indeed they are encouraged by opinionmakers, to meddle: to force faster growth by injecting rivers of dollars into the economy, to divert capital flows through a concrete latticework of regulation, to nurture even zombies and other invasive species through bailouts,” he wrote. “But the economy is less a machine than a natural ecosystem, less an engine than a complex organism, like a forest or ocean.”
A recent addition to a chorus of books on the impact of gender bias on the economy and society, "Fair Shake: Women & the Fight to Build a Just Economy by Naomi Cahn, June Carbone and Nancy Levit rests on a premise of a “winner take all economy.”
What’s a winner-take-all model? The authors see it as a system that favors one dominant player, an economy in which “those at the top take a much larger share of institutional resources for themselves.”
A book that opens with a description of a lawsuit against Tesla is condemnation of the male-dominanted, business-as-usual style of corporate governance that has been at the heart of the U.S. economy in the last few decades.
While it was written before the 2024 presidential election, its arguments and warnings seem even more timely after the reelection of Donald Trump and the unprecedented rise of tech billionaires like Elon Musk. The authors trace it back to the rise of executive compensation.
“The transformation in executive compensation brought back the late nineteenth-century robber baron mindset of no-holds barred competition, individualism at the expense of institutions and community, and a zero-sum worldview in which those who ‘win’ by any means necessary become the toast of the town,” they write.
And women, in this retelling, are among the core losers when such a system is in place.
“We have shown that women’s lost ground is a product of those developments and that that the treatment of women is an early indicator of a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many, not just women” the book concludes.
The authors' proposed solution is to “create a powerful countermovement” and to “call out those in power.”
Their account of women who have done so successfully is compelling, and the book does work as a timely warning that a lopsided economic system is unlikely to endure. But there aren’t enough signs or arguments that there is greater awareness or public interest in a more equal, inclusive economy. If anything, this book illustrates how it’s about to become a lot worse, as the key apostles of the “winner take all” economy prepare to take office.
You may not have been aware of it given all the turmoil going on in the human world, but the plant world is going through a kind of revolution of its own.
In "The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth," Zoë Schlanger, a climate change reporter at The Atlantic, lays out some of the recent studies on plant life and also the controversy and thrills of scientific discovery surrounding these breakthroughs.
We tend to think of scientific truths as indisputable, but over the years we’ve seen time and again that what we come to accept as scientific truths about the animal world are often heavily influenced by what we, as humans, believe.
Some of the questions that are raised in the book: Do plants have consciousness, similar to what we are learning about dogs and other animals? Has what we’ve been assuming about plants and their life been correct all along, going back to Charles Darwin? Even if some of these newer revelations are true, what would this mean for us as a human species?
While there are more questions than answers about the nature of plant communication and what it means for life on Earth, this book is sure to make you think differently about your household plant pets and how we view plants in general. If these ideas become mainstream or if consumers start raising questions about “plant welfare” similar to animal welfare, what would that mean for the agriculture industry?
“Up until this point, we’ve located intelligence in animals much evolutionarily closer to ourselves, like dolphins, dogs, and primates, our much more recent cousins, but we now know that powerful cunning can evolve completely independently from our own,” Schlanger writes. “A similar tectonic shift is happening with plants, only — for now — more quietly, in the labs and field sites of one of the least flashy disciplines within the life sciences. But the weight of this knowledge is threatening to burst the walls of the container in which we place plants in our minds. Ultimately it may change how we think about life altogether.”
Another contemplation on the nature of capitalism as well as a more optimistic take on the climate crisis comes from science journalist Akshat Rathi, who offers an array of examples and solutions to solving one of the biggest challenges of our time.
"Climate Capitalism: Winning the Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of Our Age" opens with the basic premise that “unfettered capitalism” is responsible for warming the planet.
“Polluting for free was always going to be a limited privilege,” Rathi notes. “Not pricing in that ‘negative externality’ — as economists put it — has been the greatest market failure of all time.”
So how do we fix it? The book brings together several case studies, from Wan Gang’s critical role in China’s electric vehicle revolution and Vicki Hollub’s efforts at Occidental Petroleum to pivot toward carbon management. It highlights significant breakthroughs in energy technology, such as QuantumScape’s development of solid-state batteries and India’s renewable energy surge through projects like Pavagada Solar Park.
The author ultimately argues in favor of a holistic approach that includes policy reforms, private investments by individuals like Bill Gates through his Breakthrough Energy Ventures as well as shareholder advocacy and climate litigation, building on successes like the Netherlands’ Urgenda case.
“As much as technological progress has been the brightest spot of the climate fight so far, it won’t be possible to keep the good news going without creating a framework that helps the deployment of those technologies at scale,” Rathi warns. “That may happen because of good laws, supportive international institutions or accessible private capital. If nothing else works, it’s clear that capitalism’s most powerful force — shareholders — are now ready to take matters into their own hands.”
The failures of the U.S. health care system have been in the spotlight since the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Dec. 4. A recent survey from NORC at University of Chicago found that seven in 10 Americans think insurance companies are to blame for Thompson’s death. That’s a lot to process not just for the insurance companies, but the entire health care system and everyone who plays a role in it, from policymakers to voters.
In another solutions-focused book, "Broken, Bankrupt, and Dying: How to Solve the Great American Healthcare Rip-off," Dr. Brad Spellberg lays out a number of inefficiencies and systemic challenges as well as where to start addressing these. This is not a neutrally worded, academic discussion of solutions: It’s written from the perspective of an active, frustrated participant in the system: a doctor, researcher and hospital administrator. His diagnosis? Spellberg calls it “the greatest rip-off perpetrated on the American people in the last century.”
"The greatest rip-off perpetrated on the American people in the last century"
Early in the book, Spellberg makes a common complaint among doctors: that the system is not efficient and requires them to allocate countless hours on administrative tasks that have nothing to do with health care.
“The U.S. healthcare system requires us to do such things before we are allowed to provide medical care,” he writes. “U.S. healthcare in the twenty-first century is not facile, not efficient, and not at all patient-centered.”
Spellberg makes a powerful case for addressing America’s overreliance on private insurance with low profit margins for basic coverage.
In the most illuminating part of the book, Spellberg shares his experience debating congressional staffers resistant to abandoning the employer-based insurance model despite its obvious shortcomings. He also compared the U.S. health care system with more successful international models in Australia and New Zealand as a way of suggesting that it doesn’t have to be this bad.
“The healthcare system we have now is an accidental outgrowth of efforts to combat post-World War II inflation,” he writes. “It was never purposefully designed to deliver healthcare.”
Spellberg advocates for a collective mobilization and makes a number of interesting proposals, including a universal, single-payer national insurance plan with co-pays for specialty care and prescription drugs, which would be funded by “centrally collected taxes that everyone pays.”
While he calls this kind of system the “most politically palatable”, it's hard to imagine a political environment — let alone a candidate — that could make it a reality.
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