Summer reading list 2026

A personal view from Debapratim De, Deloitte’s Chief Economist in the UK.

Summer reading list 2026

This week’s briefing provides a list of seven non-fiction articles – and one podcast – as an alternative to traditional summer holiday reading. These articles are free, although some websites may have restrictions on how many articles can be read without charge.

1. How's this Labour government different from those of the late 90s and early noughties? In this recent interview with political commentator Sam Freedman, former New Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn suggests that, over the last two years, the Labour government hasn't always demonstrated a clarity of strategy he saw in earlier New Labour administrations. From the growing influence of social media on speeches and policymaking to rising risk aversion in Whitehall and government, Mr Milburn reflects on how the world and, therefore, the art of politics has changed over the last quarter of a century.
2. Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, parliament used its new-found powers to reorganise land rights and inheritance law, making sustained investments in infrastructure and agriculture possible for the first time across England. This, in turn, delivered faster growth and a prolonged improvement in living standards. In this Works in Progress essay, Kara Dimitruk and Ben Southwood discuss how parliament went about addressing the 'vetocracy' that had held back growth for centuries and what lessons we could draw from that experience today.
3. The Chinese economy saw a major real estate boom turn to bust in late 2021. Yet, it avoided a recession. In this article, economist Noah Smith explains how Chinese policymakers used a surge in lending to the industrial sector, to lean against the slowdown. Mr Smith argues that China has used this unorthodox policy to successfully avoid three downturns since the Global Financial Crisis. While this may be an effective tool for macroeconomic stabilisation, the article questions its side effects, with large amounts of unproductive lending likely to weigh on China's future growth prospects.
4. Food theft is big business. You may have read about the great maple syrup heist in 2012, when $18 million worth of maple syrup was stolen from a warehouse in Canada. 2023 saw the attempted theft of a trailer containing 200,000 Cadbury Creme eggs in Shropshire. And in March this year, 12 tons of KitKat bars were stolen in transit from Italy to Poland. These incidents might suggest that food thieves are usually after sweet treats. But the most stolen food in the world is cheese! This Longreads essay describes the theft of 22 tons of premium Hafod cheddar cheese from Neal’s Yard Dairy, examining why organised criminals target artisanal dairy products across Europe.
5. Increasing proof of Gen AI's economic usefulness has coincided with growing concerns over its job-destroying potential. But many professions have survived the invention of technologies that threatened to destroy them. This essay by Adam Ozimek describes how musicians reacted to the inventions of the pianola and the phonograph in the 19th century. And why the desire for human engagement has led to a growing demand for live music since those inventions.
6. New research suggests that GLP-1 weight loss drugs could help women find jobs and also increase their household incomes. In this podcast from the FT, Harvard professor Rebecca Diamond, who conducted this study, joins consumer editor Claer Barrett and columnist Soumaya Keynes for a fascinating discussion on how these drugs are changing consumer tastes and the wider economy.
7. Energy supply is often seen as a bottleneck in rapid buildouts of AI data centres. This Works in Progress article by Chris Gillett describes the energy requirements of AI data centres and argues that the planned AI infrastructure buildout in the US is limited not by the availability of energy but by pace of connections to the grid.
8. Why did it take more than a century to produce a useful steam engine when a working model – the aeolipile – was produced in antiquity? Why was wheeled luggage only 'invented' in the 1950s? In this essay, Brian Potter of Construction Physics uses a novel LLM-powered research method, to examine why inventions often follow several decades after the establishment of the fundamental scientific and technical principles underlying them.