Capitalism in America

Greenspan and Wooldridge — the former Federal Reserve chairman and The Economist’s political editor — narrate four centuries of American economic history around a single mechanism: creative destruction. Their claim is that the United States outgrew its peers because it let failure happen faster than anyone else, and their worry is that it has since accumulated the entitlements, litigation, regulation and incumbent protection that slow the process down. Productivity is the through-line and the verdict; the book’s pessimism is about the political difficulty of restoring it, not about the mechanism.

Why it’s on the list: The section is Value Investing, Finance, and Capitalism — and capitalism, not just finance, is genuinely in the title of it. Li Lu’s list pairs the how-to-invest literature with structural economic history, on the view that the returns available to an investor are a function of what kind of economy he is investing in.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 38 in the value-investing section, cited with no year. Kyle saved the list as two X posts, from @F_Compounders and @themattharbaugh, that between them photographed only this section; the full list was recovered from the source PDF.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the bibliography this came from.
• Creative Destruction — the organising mechanism; the list also carries Schumpeter, where the term comes from.
• Capitalism · Economic History — the subject.