I highly, highly recommend Doing Innovation in the Innovation Economy by William Janeway to anyone who wants to truly understand the nature of our economy. It's

I highly, highly recommend Doing Innovation in the Innovation Economy by William Janeway to anyone who wants to truly understand the nature of our economy. It's basically this piece elaborated in exhaustive detail by a Ph.D economist and 40+ year veteran of the finance world. To me, it's at once a thorough investigation of the history of markets and the boom/bust cycle, a defense of Keynesianism and the State as an economic player, and a memoir of a pioneer of the modern venture capital industry. Even more importantly, I think it's an incredible analysis of the actual nature of our economy. We've never actually been any sort of ideologically pure system, and Janeway argues that there's actually something very important about how our system historically has been, as opposed to what purist capitalists and socialists might have it be. The biggest flaw of the book is that it really needed a gifted editor. There's a lot to the book, and it could have benefited from much more careful organization. Janeway seems to presume a great deal of familiarity with economics and the financial industry, and it made the book challenging for me to fully comprehend without taking notes and looking up unknown terms myself. But it was well worth the effort.