The 6 best business books of 2017, according to economists, editors, and professors

There have been many investigations into the current state of income inequality in the developed world, but Stanford historian Walter Scheidel's provocative book is an attempt at tracing the history of income inequality throughout the entirety of man's existence.

Scheidel argues that the only effective means of closing vast income gaps has been through violent movements; to be clear, he doesn't condone them. His conclusion, however, is that in modern society, vast income inequality will be more persistent than many of us would like to believe.

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"The Spider Network" is Wall Street Journal editor David Enrich's definitive tale of how in 2006, six bankers from around the world formed an uneasy alliance to manipulate the small group of people that determined the value of Libor — the London interbank offer rate, which sets the interest rates for trillions of dollars of global loans — and make millions in the process. Of course, the scheme eventually fell apart in spectacular fashion.

Enrich takes a complex financial story and makes it read like an accessible thriller.

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This year marks the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, the device that made Apple the most valuable company in the world and transformed the way people interact with technology.

To mark the occasion, Motherboard senior editor Brian Merchant uses "The One Device" as a deep dive into the decisions and breakthroughs behind the development of the historic smartphone.

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Ellen Pao sued her company, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, in 2012 for $16 million in lost wages due to gender discrimination, which then led to her firing. The case went to trial in 2015 and became a spectacle in the tech world.

The court ruled in Kleiner Perkins' favor on all four counts, but Pao continued to crusade for women's rights in tech, and inspired an ongoing wave of women in the industry to speak up against ingrained sexism in the Valley.

"Reset" is Pao's account of what happened, and what her experience of the past few years has taught her.

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The 2016 US presidential election highlighted deep divides within the United States, and brought to the forefront the concerns of middle-class Americans whose jobs have disappeared due to increased globalization and the Great Recession.

Washington Post reporter Amy Goldstein embedded herself in a town particularly affected by these forces: Janesville, Wisconsin, which is also the hometown of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Through extensive interviews with all walks of life there, she explores why so many Americans have been struggling to make a living.

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For the past few decades, economists have debated the implications of efficient market theory, which states that investors and markets are rational and efficient, and the implications of behavioral economics, which essentially states the opposite.

MIT Sloan School of Management professor Andrew Lo argues in "Adaptive Markets" that efficient market theory is just incomplete rather than wrong, and offers a new way of understanding how investors behave and markets adapt.

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