Drawing on economic crises from the 1960s through the 2000s, What Went Wrong With Capitalism by Ruchir Sharma examines whether tax cuts and easier financial conditions can genuinely produce shared prosperity. Published in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book argues that capitalism’s dysfunction is not the result of market failure alone, but of decades of policy choices that expanded government intervention, normalized debt, encouraged easy credit, and weakened competition.

Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis is a timely and insightful book that sheds light on the U.S. government as a vast, complex system powered by people, largely unrecognized and uncelebrated, whose work profoundly shapes everyday life.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute. One of her acclaimed books published in 2024, Autocracy, Inc.: Dictators Who Want to Run the World, investigates where autocracy came from, why it persists, how the democratic world originally helped consolidate autocratic countries, and how we can defeat autocracy.