The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Ebb and Flow of History. David Hackett Fisher.
This book is incredibly, incredibly prescient. Written in 1997, almost predicts the current financial situation. If you want to have an idea where, based on 1000 years of history, our economy and the state of the world is going, then you should read it. It didn't change my perspective (I called the crash of 2008-2009 a few months before it happened) but it really gave me a firmer understanding behind why I was correct to have felt like that was going to happen. It's also a page-turner. Fisher is an incredibly good writer and wrote a fascinating picture of revolutionary america in "Paul Revere's Ride".
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Wave-Revolutions-Rhythm-History/...
Malcolm Gladwell's books are good, too, but my position on them is that the insight is all stuff you should have figured out - sometimes you just need gentle reminding. I noticed outliers and tipping point on your shelf, those will go very very far in helping you come up with entrepreneurial strategies. Outliers got me off my butt and got me programming android (I hadn't touched computer programming in 4+ years)... I would suggest popping the gladwells to the front of your queue.
Huh? That's what the inflationary road leads to. This should be obvious, inflation skims value off the top of everyone's savings and channels it to the ultra rich (or politically connected, aka ultra rich). Almost every society in history, over the past 4000 or so years has been weakened by inflation, not deflation.
As a counterpoint, the US, which had a pretty good net deflationary run for about 150 years, had a pretty significant social equalization (freeing the slaves) over that time period.
The "deflationary spiral" hypothetical is popular idea but it is not supported by any historical evidence whatsoever (conceding that it may be true), mostly because despots have had a really hard time keeping themselves from debasing the currency over history.
I suggest reading this for some broad historical perspective: http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Wave-Revolutions-History/dp/...