Economics is not about supply and demand curves. It is about how people actually make decisions under pressure, uncertainty, and scarcity — and how the systems we have built reflect those decisions back at us at scale. These books replace the textbook abstraction with something messier and more honest: the informal economies, the perverse incentives, the ideological assumptions hiding inside the models we call science. The speakers here are economists, journalists, and anthropologists who have spent time looking at what money actually does to people.