REUTERS/Charles Platiau
French economist Thomas Piketty's 2014 bestseller, "Capital in the 21st Century," is still a foundational text on understanding today's destabilizing inequality.
- Our Better Capitalism series focuses on why inequality has been hurting economic growth, and why new approaches to business and policy can be a course correction.
- We've chosen books from writers like the economist Joseph Stiglitz and the futurist Amy Webb that make sense of where we are, how we got here, and where we should be headed.
- This article is part of Business Insider's ongoing series on Better Capitalism.
For over a year, Business Insider has been exploring why we need "Better Capitalism" and how we can achieve it.
It started with the rejection of the shareholder primacy theory that grew in popularity in the late 1970s and became the norm beginning in the '80s. It's led to a short-term focus on profits above all else, and we're arguing that this has come at the expense of stakeholders like workers and communities, and has been a significant factor in the country's out-of-control wage-and-wealth inequality.
We've found that there is an increasingly loud call to tie profits to purpose, and it's not just a moral argument.
To make sense of where we are today and where we should be headed, we've gathered some of our favorite books on the economy and the role of business in society.