Reference

Sources and further reading.

The master bibliography for the site. Each entry carries a one-line note on why it is here. Time-sensitive figures carry their edition or date, and volatile items such as index scores, tariff status, and the China plan stay on a standing quarterly review.

Primary texts

  • Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. The founding text; source for the system of natural liberty and the invisible hand passage.
  • Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, 1867. The most influential critique; source for the capitalist mode of production.
  • John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936. The modifier's handbook: manage the cycle, keep the system.
  • Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942. Source for creative destruction.
  • Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944, and The Use of Knowledge in Society, American Economic Review, 1945. The knowledge-problem argument behind the price-signal pillar.
  • Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 1962. Economic freedom as a precondition of political freedom.

Comparative frameworks

  • Peter Hall and David Soskice, editors, Varieties of Capitalism, 2001. The liberal versus coordinated market economy distinction; the scholarly backbone of bands L1 and L2.
  • Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights, 1998. The twentieth-century tug of war between state and market, told as narrative history.
  • Branko Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone, 2019. The framing that liberal and political capitalism are now the only two systems standing; directly relevant to the China page.

The debates

These sources support the four debates. Every citation on that page carries a TODO-VERIFY flag until checked against its source, because the debates are written beyond the content source files.

  • Arthur Cecil Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 1920. Named the externality problem and proposed the corrective tax; the starting point of the first debate.
  • Ronald Coase, "The Problem of Social Cost," Journal of Law and Economics 3 (1960), pp. 1-44. Externalities as a property-rights problem rather than a market failure; the most cited work in legal scholarship.
  • Martin Weitzman, "Prices vs. Quantities," Review of Economic Studies 41 (1974), pp. 477-491. Why price and quantity instruments are not equivalent under uncertainty; the technical core of the permit-market objection.
  • Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, 1990. Eight design principles for communities governing shared resources without privatization or state control; evidence the choice is not simply market or state.
  • George Stigler, "The Theory of Economic Regulation," Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2:1 (1971), pp. 3-21. Regulatory capture as an economic prediction rather than a complaint; used by both sides of the cronyism debate.
  • Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations, Yale University Press, 1982. Institutional sclerosis: distributional coalitions accumulate in stable societies and slow growth. The strongest form of the inseparability case.
  • Francois Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson, "Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820-1992," American Economic Review 92:4 (2002), pp. 727-744. The long-run reconstruction behind the poverty figure on the homepage and the attribution debate.
  • Angus Deaton, The Great Escape, 2013. Growth as the engine of the escape from both poverty and early death.
  • Jason Hickel, The Divide, 2017. The case that the poverty decline is sensitive to the line chosen and that the progress narrative understates the failure; the strongest form of the against-attribution position.
  • Nicholas Lardy, The State Strikes Back, Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2019. The internal evidence that China's fastest growth came when private firms were gaining ground; the misallocation case.
  • Joe Studwell, How Asia Works, 2013. Land reform, directed credit, and export discipline as the actual catch-up pattern; the counterexample case.
  • Dani Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes, 2007. Growth policies are country-specific and not the textbook set; the general form of the industrial-policy defense.

China

  • Isabella Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy, 2021. The reform-era pricing debates; why China kept the cage.
  • Margaret Pearson, Meg Rithmire, and Kellee Tsai, Party-State Capitalism in China, 2021 and subsequent papers. Source for the party-state capitalism classification on china.html.
  • Arthur Kroeber, China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know, second edition, 2020 (Oxford University Press). The standard one-volume orientation; source for SOE and land finance mechanics. Second edition published September 2020; first edition 2016.
  • World Bank poverty data for China. Source for the roughly 800 million figure on china.html.
  • China National Bureau of Statistics, 2025 annual data, via Caixin Global, January 2026. Source for the 2025 property downturn, the population decline, and the youth unemployment figures on china.html.
  • International Monetary Fund, China Article IV, via OMFIF, 2025. Source for the augmented-debt and local-government-debt shares on china.html.
  • State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), via Caixin Global, 2026. Source for the count of 100 central state-owned enterprises on china.html.
  • China Briefing (Dezan Shira and Associates), 15th Five-Year Plan recommendations, 2025. Source for the technological self-reliance emphasis of the 15th Five-Year Plan on china.html.
  • Al Jazeera, "China's key NPC meeting comes to a close as lower growth target set," March 12, 2026. Source for the adoption of the 15th Five-Year Plan at the National People's Congress and its headline growth target of 4.5 to 5 percent, on china.html.

Indices and data

  • Heritage Foundation, 2026 Index of Economic Freedom. Source for all 2026 scores and ranks used on the site: Singapore 84.4, Switzerland 83.7, Ireland 83.3, Australia 80.1, Taiwan 79.8, United States 72.8 and 22nd, China 48.3, Russia 50.3, and the four-country Free tier.
  • Fraser Institute, Economic Freedom of the World, 2025 Annual Report (data year 2023). The second standard index, for cross-checking. Top five: Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States.
  • Our World in Data, extreme poverty series, building on Bourguignon and Morrisson. Source for the hero stat on what-is-capitalism.html and the homepage.
  • Housing and Development Board (HDB), Annual Report 2024/2025 Key Statistics, Singapore. Source for the 76 percent HDB housing figure on countries.html.
  • Korea Herald (Yonhap), Samsung Electronics overseas revenue, 2019. Source for the Samsung share of South Korean exports on countries.html.

United States institutions

  • US Department of the Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statement, final fiscal year 2024. Source for the federal spending composition on america.html: social insurance plus health about 48 percent of outlays, Social Security the single largest function at 21.6 percent. Corroborated by the Congressional Budget Office Monthly Budget Review.
  • Bureau of Economic Analysis and International Monetary Fund, 2024, via FRED. Source for total government spending of roughly 36 percent of GDP on america.html.
  • Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, certification and licensing data, 2024 annual averages. Source for the 21.6 percent occupational licensing figure and the license versus certification definition on america.html.
  • Urban Institute, Housing Finance At A Glance, December 2025. Source for the roughly 63 percent federally backed mortgage share on america.html.
  • US Supreme Court tariff ruling, February 2026, via the Tax Foundation. Source for the tariff status on america.html: the 2025 emergency-powers tariffs struck down, with Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs remaining.
  • Federal Reserve History, federalreservehistory.org. Source for the 1913, 1933, 1971, and 2008 monetary entries.

Denmark statement

  • Lars Lokke Rasmussen, "Nordic Solutions and Challenges: A Danish Perspective," Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, October 2015. Source for the Denmark-is-a-market-economy statement on the spectrum and countries pages. Reported contemporaneously by The Local Denmark (1 November 2015) and the Harvard Crimson (30 October 2015): "Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy."