The announcement of the shortlist for the FT’s Business Book of the Year is always interesting – tellingly, the article about it in yesterday’s paper had the headline A reading list to reflect loss of faith in capitalism. As ever, I’ve read some, but not all, of the titles, so it adds some interesting new ones to my reading list. Of the shortlist, I’ve reviewed Why Nations Fail, Paper Promises and What Money Can’t Buy.

I’ve gone back through the months since January 2012 to pick out my own longish shortlist for The Enlightened Economist Prize (the criterion is that I happened to read them in the past 12 months, and my non-economics reading is excluded).

The list is:

[amazon_link id=”1612191819″ target=”_blank” ]Debt: The First 5000 Years[/amazon_link] David Graeber

[amazon_link id=”0674057759″ target=”_blank” ]Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes[/amazon_link] Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman

[amazon_link id=”0141033576″ target=”_blank” ]Thinking, Fast and Slow[/amazon_link] Daniel Kahneman

[amazon_link id=”0393077489″ target=”_blank” ]Keynes-Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics[/amazon_link] Nicholas Wapshott

[amazon_link id=”0306818833″ target=”_blank” ]The End of Money [/amazon_link]David Wolman

[amazon_link id=”0099541726″ target=”_blank” ]Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World[/amazon_link] Nicholas Shaxson

[amazon_link id=”1846684293″ target=”_blank” ]Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty[/amazon_link] Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

[amazon_link id=”0199794642″ target=”_blank” ]Working Hard, Working Poor: A Global Journey[/amazon_link] Gary Fields

[amazon_link id=”0691147566″ target=”_blank” ]The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East[/amazon_link] Timur Kuran

[amazon_link id=”0300117779″ target=”_blank” ]The New Industrial Revolution: Consumers, Globalization and the End of Mass Production [/amazon_link]Peter Marsh

[amazon_link id=”1906924775″ target=”_blank” ]Economic Fables[/amazon_link] Ariel Rubinstein

[amazon_link id=”0571279201″ target=”_blank” ]Positive Linking: How Networks Can Revolutionise the World[/amazon_link] Paul Ormerod

[amazon_link id=”1847940978″ target=”_blank” ]Dark Pools: The rise of AI trading machines and the looming threat to Wall Street [/amazon_link]Scott Patterson

[amazon_link id=”0691155895″ target=”_blank” ]The Quest for Prosperity; How Developing Economies Can Take Off[/amazon_link] Justin Yifu Lin

The winner of The Enlightened Economist economics book of 2012 will also be announced in September. I can’t offer a cash prize but will be delighted to offer a nice dinner in London to the winning author(s).

The prize – dinner’s on me