If you’re building your to-be-read list for the coming year or a stack in case you’re snowed in, the editors at The Daily Economy would like to suggest some of our favorite and most-anticipated reads.
Each book below combines thought-provoking (and often data-rich) prose on economic growth, innovation, and human flourishing.
1. Peak Human by Johan Norberg
Joakim Book reviewed a big new book for our 2026 reading list: Peak Human by Johan Norberg, which traces the rise and fall of seven of history’s greatest civilizations and shows how openness to ideas, trade, and human exchange has driven human progress.
Norberg argues that golden ages—from Athens and Rome to the modern Anglosphere—flourished when societies were open and free, and declined when they closed in on themselves. His long view of history connects economic, cultural, and political forces to ask whether our own era can sustain its peak rather than slip into stagnation.
Read Joakim’s review to learn more about Peak Human and why it’s one of the books worth your time in 2026.
2. Surviving Rome by Kim Bowes
As many know, 2023 was the year people figured out that Americans — especially men, apparently — think about the Roman Empire a lot. Kim Bowes, an American archaeologist and professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is tapping into that interest. Her new book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, examines the everyday economic realities of ordinary Romans, showing how trade, labor, and household management shaped life for the vast majority of the population rather than the emperors and elites we usually hear about.
The Daily Economy hasn’t reviewed it yet, but Lawrence Reed will be offering a full review after the New Year, giving readers a glimpse at the practical aspects of economic history that are often overlooked.
3. The Social Philosophers by Robert Nisbet
Paul Mueller explores a big question in social thought: how do communities actually form and what holds them together? Drawing on Robert Nisbet’s latest book, The Social Philosophers, Mueller walks through the major forms of community that have shaped human history — from kinship and military bonds to political, religious, and plural associations — showing how each responds to different pressures and offers distinct ways people organize, cooperate, and find meaning.
Mueller argues that communities aren’t just aggregations of individuals but networks of intermediate institutions — families, churches, voluntary associations — that mediate between the individual and the state. He traces how shifts from one dominant community type to another have driven cultural and political change across eras.
If you’re looking to understand how communities form — and why some thrive — Nisbet’s Social Philosophers offers a valuable framework worth revisiting.
4. An Abundance of Caution by David Zweig
David Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions delivers a hard‑hitting account of how pandemic policies — especially prolonged school closures — were driven by flawed modeling and weak evidence, with consequences still being felt by children and families. Zweig meticulously documents how trusted institutions, health authorities, and much of the media embraced assumptions that ignored real‑world data, keeping millions of students out of classrooms long after risks to healthy children were minimal and deepening educational and social harms in the process.
In his review for The Daily Economy, Paul D. Thacker highlights how Zweig’s reporting exposes the limits of predictive models and the damage done when “follow the science” becomes rigid compliance, eroding trust in expertise and public‑health leadership. Read the analysis to learn more about how pandemic forecasting failed and why that matters for how we interpret scientific models and public‑health decisions going forward.
5. Our Dollar, Your Problem by Kenneth Rogoff
Kenneth Rogoff’s Our Dollar, Your Problem is a compelling guided tour of the “Pax Dollar” era, which defined global trade since the Second World War and seems to be drawing to a close. The book’s strength is its clear-eyed emphasis on incentives and political constraints. Rogoff is no apologist for central banking hubris: he highlights how America’s “exorbitant privilege” can breed moral hazard, encourage excessive debt, and export volatility to the rest of the world.
No particular currency is predicted to dethrone King Dollar, but Rogoff cautions that fiscal drift and political bullying is chipping away at the castle’s foundation.
6. After the Spike by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso
Decades after Julian Simon called human minds the planet’s “Ultimate Resource,” the case must again be made that more people can create more prosperity than increased population could erode. Global population growth is slowing, with birth rates in China, India, and across Latin America now falling.
In After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, Dean Spears and Michael Geruso rise to the challenge, showing that fertility rates in most countries have fallen below replacement levels and are likely to drive a long-term decline in global population. True human progress — from scientific breakthroughs to economic cooperation — has historically thrived in densely interconnected societies with abundant human capital. Fewer people could weaken the very engine of innovation and prosperity that has lifted billions out of poverty.
7. The Land Trap by Mike Bird
Writing with a journalist’s pace and an economist’s instincts, Mike Bird, Wall Street editor at The Economist, shows how land — fixed, scarce, and politically charged — has repeatedly shaped and reshaped governments and societal wealth.
For early agricultural civilizations, “the way in which land was owned, organized, and used was one of the foremost promises of state-building, which made the difference between economic survival and total collapse.” In other words, the way building crunches and land-use regulations shape our economic lives now has been centuries in the making.
From all of us here at The Daily Economy, Happy New Year.
