An interdisciplinary workshop about capitalism was always going to generate an eclectic mix of books referred to; I always like to make a note of what crops up. So at The New Institute this week, the focus was Colin Mayer’s important recent book Capitalism and Crises, which centres on his proposal that profit maximisation should continue to be the aim of private companies but profit much be redefined to be net of the cost of any damages inflicted on the rest of society (including workers but not rival businesses in competitive markets). He argues that UK corporate law is already capable of this interpretation.

In the other talks, these other books mentioned make up a pretty good capitalism reading list – although I might have missed a few:

The End of Enlightenment by Richard Whatmore

Sense, Nonsense and Subjectivity  by Markus Gabriel

Capitalism and the Market Economy by Jonathan McMillan

Stabilising an Unstable Economy by Hyman Minsky

The Ethics of Capitalism by Daniel Halliday and John Thrasher

Noise by Daniel Kahneman

A Moral Political Economy by Federica Carugati and Margaret Levi

The Corporation in the 21st Century (forthcoming) by John Kay

The Coming of Managerial Capitalism by Alfred Chandler

Competition Overdose by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke

Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics by Herman Daly

Ökoliberal by Philipp Krohn

Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom