Business Insider's Better Capitalism series focuses on why inequality has been hurting economic growth, and why new approaches to business and policy can be a course correction.

Today, Congress is grilling the big tech CEOs about antitrust for the first time.

We've listed books like "Goliath" by Matthew Stoller and "The Meritocracy Trap" by Daniel Markovits that make sense of how we got to this point.

This article is part of Business Insider's ongoing series on Better Capitalism.

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There's been a shift in corporate America over the past few years toward equality and accountability.

Leaders are increasingly being held accountable for not only their role in the economy, but in society, as evidenced by Wednesday's Congressional hearing with big tech CEOs like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The executives will face questions on whether they're hampering innovation and contributing to a fair society.

The move toward accountability gained speed in August 2019, when nearly 200 CEOs of America's largest companies declared their companies exist for the "benefit of all stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders." This collection of CEOs, the lobbying group the Business Roundtable, rejected the idea that maximizing shareholder value at all costs will take care of everything else.

Their statement was not legally binding, but even if it ends up merely symbolic, it marks a significant shift in the conversation. Since the beginning of last year, Business Insider has been exploring the momentum behind this shift — why we need "Better Capitalism," as we call it, and how we can achieve it.

Our series started with the rejection of the shareholder primacy theory that grew in popularity in the late 1970s and became the norm beginning in the '80s. That theory led to a short-term focus on profits above all else, and we're arguing that this has come at the expense of other stakeholders, and has been a significant factor in the country's out-of-control wage-and-wealth inequality.

We've found that there is an increasingly loud call to tie profits to purpose, and it's not just a moral argument, especially today amid the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide calls for racial justice.

To make sense of where we are today and where we should be headed, we've gathered some of our favorite books on the economy and the role of business in society.

This is an updated version of a story that ran on March 16, 2019.