You're welcome. I'm not going to claim great insight (yet), I'm still stumbling through this stuff myself (and have been for 25 years).
Other than Mancur Olsen, some of the more interesting reading I've found includes George Akerlof ("The Market for Lemons"), Garrett Hardin ("Lifeboat Ethics", "Tragedy of the Commons", and several books of essays), Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (a cunningly disguised treatise on the emergence of stock corporations, banking, and modern finance and capital), Niall Fergusson's The Ascent of Money (a less cunningly disguised version of same), and The Ordinary Business of Life which is dry as dust but still a wonderful exposition of 3000 years of economic thought.
A book I've just heard of but haven't read is David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He's a radical anthropologist, but has some really keen insights and views on the formation of credit and money (guess which came first).
Other than Mancur Olsen, some of the more interesting reading I've found includes George Akerlof ("The Market for Lemons"), Garrett Hardin ("Lifeboat Ethics", "Tragedy of the Commons", and several books of essays), Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (a cunningly disguised treatise on the emergence of stock corporations, banking, and modern finance and capital), Niall Fergusson's The Ascent of Money (a less cunningly disguised version of same), and The Ordinary Business of Life which is dry as dust but still a wonderful exposition of 3000 years of economic thought.
A book I've just heard of but haven't read is David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He's a radical anthropologist, but has some really keen insights and views on the formation of credit and money (guess which came first).