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Showing posts with the label economics

POVERTY, BY AMERICA (audiobook) by Matthew Desmond

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Published in 2023 by Random House Audio. Read by Dion Graham. Duration: 5 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged. As of the day I am writing this review, 7 of the top 10 richest people in the world live in the United States (the least wealthy has $80 billion.) The rate continues on when you go down the list - 14 of the top 20 live in the United States.  The United States has 650 billionaires. But, the official poverty rate in the United States at this moment is 11.5% - the highest rate in the in the leading industrialized economies of the world. This chart shows that it has bounced around between 10.5% and 15%, depending on the economic recessions and the like f or the last 30 years . During this entire time, the United States has been the leader in wealth creation for the entire planet. The author, Matthew Desmond Sociology professor Matthew Desmond set out to find out why. It's easy to look at those billionaires and note that they don't pay their fair share. The tax code is tailor mad

THE GRAPES of WRATH (audiobook) by John Steinbeck

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  Originally Published in 1939. Audiobook version published in 2011 by Penguin Audio. Performed by Dylan Baker. Duration: 21 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Winner of the National Book Award. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Declared to be the best-selling book of 1939 by the New York Times. I last read The Grapes of Wrath when I was in high school, nearly 40 years ago. It was assigned reading for my English class and all I really remembered about it was a couple of scenes. I remembered the last scene, with the flood and starving man. And I remembered and early scene where the tractor operator is plowing up the farms, the farmyards and even intentionally damaging homes in Oklahoma. Besides that, I had nothing but a pervasive memory of sorrow and injustice. I've always thought of this book and Of Mice and Men as kind of a set of books about migrant farm workers during the Great Depression. I've read Of Mice and Men  5 or 6 times, though - a fact that I can one hundred percent attribu

OF BOYS and MEN: WHY the MODERN MALE IS STRUGGLING, WHY IT MATTERS, and WHAT to DO ABOUT IT (audiobook) by Richard V. Reeves

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Published in September of 2022 by Blackstone Publishing. Read by the author, Richard V. Reeves. Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Men, as a group, are struggling in today's economy. The average male's income has falling in inflation-adjusted terms, especially so when you factor out upper class and upper middle class men. Men are more likely to be arrested, be addicts, be homeless, and more likely to succeed at killing themselves. Boys are struggling in today's educational system. They are far more likely to be suspended, expelled or placed in a special education program. They are far less likely to graduate from high school. They far less likely to attempt any sort of post-secondary education (a majority of all college students are female) or training and far less likely to complete that training or degree - even in the rare situations where the post-secondary training and/or education are essentially free. Reeves, an economist with the Brookings Institutions, sees

THE PARANOID STYLE in AMERICAN POLITICS and OTHER ESSAYS by Richard Hofstadter

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  -Originally published by Harper's Magazine in 1964 and in book form by Alfred A. Knopf in 1965. -Audiobook published in 2018 by Tantor Audio. -Read by Keith Sellon-Wright. -Duration: 10 hours, 44 minutes. -Unabridged. Award-winning historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) wrote these essays over a series of years and compiled them into a collection with a loose theme of how American politics is affected by paranoid conspiracies.  Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) He starts with the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater and the political commentary of groups like the John Birch Society. His descriptions of the Goldwater campaign sound so much like the Trump campaign of 2016 that a reader can almost replace the name Goldwater with the name Trump. The details are, of course, different, but the tone is practically the same.  The ideological framework of the John Birch Society is replaced with QAnon, the fear of communism is replaced with the fear of immigrants but the tone is practica

WEST from APPOMATTOX: THE RECONSTRUCTION of AMERICA after the CIVIL WAR (kindle) by Heather Cox Richardson

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  Published in 2007. Heather Cox Richardson is a historian I have only recently discovered because of her prolific social media presence that she developed while under Covid lockdown. She writes a daily news summary of a few paragraphs with a view towards how these events match up with historical events or trends. Plus, she takes questions from people and develops a one hour daily online lecture. They are interesting, sometimes rambling little presentations and this book shares a lot of the same features.  Teddy Roosevelt (center with glasses) and the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War Richardson is looking at the time right after the Civil War in American History.  In the history books, Reconstruction, the Old West, the Gilded Age and the Spanish-American War are all treated a separate things. Combining all of these typical divisions of American history into one book makes for a more comprehensive study of the time period.  Traditionally, they are studied separately - in a typic

WILDLAND: THE MAKING of AMERICA'S FURY (audiobook) by Evan Osnos

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  Published in September of 2021 by Macmillan Audio. Read by the author, Evan Osnos. Duration: 17 hours, 7 minutes. Unabridged. Evan Osnos is a reporter for The New Yorker . He was inspired to write about the phenomenon of Donald Trump and the 2016 and 2020 elections when he returned from an multi-year assignment in China and noted that politics, journalism and even economics in the United States had changed. He didn't use this analogy, but I will: Parents don't notice their kids changing and growing because they see them every day. But, the aunts and uncles who only see them at the holidays can easily detect the changes. Osnos went to three places that he used to live to investigate: Greenwich, Connecticut; Chicago, Illinois; and Clarksburg, West Virginia.  In West Virginia, he primarily looks at the changes in journalism such as the loss of local news and small town newspapers. He also looks at government pulling back environmental regulations and business avoiding responsibi

GARBOLOGY: OUR DIRTY LOVE AFFAIR with TRASH (audiobook) by Edward Humes

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  Published in 2015 by Tantor Audio. Read by Joe Barrett. Duration: 8 hours, 36 minutes. Unabridged. Garbology is the study of garbage. Archaeologists use garbology to learn all about ancient societies - what they ate, their tools, their clothing, their toys, their technology, etc. You can also apply garbology to modern garbage dumps and Humes uses this as an entrance to discussing all sorts of issues about our modern world and our problem with waste. Humes figures that the average American is on pace to create more than one hundred tons of garbage per person per lifetime. This is higher than the estimates you usually find because those estimates don't include the waste created on your behalf by manufacturers and service providers. The book starts out very strong with a look at how landfills and trash removal have evolved over time. Sounds boring but I found it to be very interesting. Later, he moved on to pollution, especially ocean pollution and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -

THE PURPOSE of POWER: HOW WE COME TOGETHER WHEN WE FALL APART (audiobook) by Alicia Garza

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Published in 2020 by Random House Audio. Read by the author, Alicia Garza. Duration: 9 hours, 31 minutes. Unabridged. Alica Garza is one of the founders of the organization Black Lives Matter .  This reader decided that he only had a superficial knowledge of the movement and wanted to learn more. This book seemed like a reasonable place to start. The first part of the book is basically a recounting of Garza's early life and her beginnings as a community organizer. This was quite enjoyable. Garza is a talented writer and she tells her story well. The author, Alicia Garza The middle part gets bogged down with some esoteric political movement talk. Lots of discussion over meanings of words like "intersectionality." I thought she made her point very clearly early on and kept on making it. This was clearly very important to the author, but the lay reader who is not heavily invested in the movement and its specific language would, like me, find this to be too much insider talk.

WHEN to ROB a BANK...and 131 MORE WARPED SUGGESTIONS and WELL-INTENDED RANTS (audiobook) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

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  Published in 2015 by HarperAudio. Duration: 8 hours, 13 minutes. Read by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner and Erik Bergmann. Unabridged. Levitt and Dubner are the authors the co-creators of the Freakonomics franchise. They have published several books, have a radio show, have a website and have had a long-running column in the New York Times . All of them have featured odd takes on economic theories (as the title of this book suggests). They also have a blog that they used as a place to put their odd thoughts - not complete articles or chapters. This book consists of 132 entries from their blog. And, that, in short, is the weakness of this audiobook. Their other works are much more thought out and this one just feels like the results of a preliminary brainstorming session. There were some interesting entries and there were some real clunkers. Also, there were way too many entries about gambling. I have absolutely no interest in gambling but the authors are really into it.  Bottom

IN DEFENSE of ELITISM: WHY I'M BETTER THAN YOU and YOU'RE BETTER THAN SOMEONE WHO DIDN'T BUY THIS BOOK (audiobook) by Joel Stein

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Published in October of 2019 by Grand Central Publishing. Read by the author, Joel Stein. Duration: 7 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Joel Stein's In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You're Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book is an interesting book. The title suggests that it is a tongue-in-cheek look at politics, but it is much more than that. To be sure, there are plenty of jokes, wisecracks, puns and witty observations of varying quality throughout the book. But, there is also a lot of solid political analysis, especially in the last third of the book. Stein's primary argument is that populism, embodied by both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders for the last 4 years, is a road to nowhere except authoritarianism. Stein, like most elites, is worried more about Trump than Sanders (makes sense - he is President, while Sanders is a Senator). Trump is well-known for his anti-intellectual tenancies. He discounts expertise and people that might have

IRRATIONALLY YOURS: ON MISSING SOCKS, PICKUP LINES, and OTHER EXISTENTIAL PUZZLES (audiobook) by Dan Ariely

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Published in 2015 by HarperAudio. Read by Simon Jones. Duration: 3 hours, 22 minutes. Unabridged. The author, Dan Ariely Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has written a lot of books and articles about his various behavioral experiments. I was not aware that he had a regular column in the Wall Street Journal that functions an awful lot like the Dear Abby column has done in newspapers for more than 60 years. People write in questions about relationships or work concerns and Ariely tries to come up with a concise, humorous answer. The fact that Ariely is a famous behavioral economist did little to make this collection feel any different than a collection of Dear Abby columns. It was not a bad listen, but not a great one either. I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  IRRATIONALLY YOURS: ON MISSING SOCKS, PICKUP LINES, and OTHER EXISTENTIAL PUZZLES by Dan Ariely .

PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: THE HIDDEN FORCES THAT SHAPE OUR DECISIONS (audiobook) by Dan Ariely

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Published in 2008 by HarperAudio. Read by Simon Jones. Duration: 7 hours, 22 minutes. Unabridged. Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist. This book looks at the assumption made by economists that people make rational decisions based on their input. Ariely delights in pointing out that oftentimes we don't make rational choices - we make irrational ones and we keep making the same types of irrational choices time after time after time. For example, if you own a restaurant and you want to sell more of your most expensive dish, all you have to do is place an even more expensive meal on the menu. It could be that no one will ever buy that most expensive meal, but they will buy more of what used to be the most expensive meal because it now looks like a comparative bargain. I enjoyed the commentary on the old marketing campaign called The Pepsi Challenge . In blind taste tests, Pepsi beat Coca-Cola by a wide margin. But, when the taste testers could see the cans of soda, Coca-Cola won b

THE FUTURE of CAPITALISM: FACING the NEW ANXIETIES (audiobook) by Paul Collier

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Published in December of 2018 by HarperAudio. Read by Peter Noble. Duration: 9 hours, 26 minutes. The author, Sir Paul Collier Unabridged. Paul Collier is an award-winning economics professor at Oxford University. His name is symbolic of how he approaches this book, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties . Collier has been knighted for his work as an economist. This means that he could have listed his name as Sir Paul Collier, but he does not. Collier may be a big shot professor who holds three positions at Oxford University (possibly the best university on the planet), but he is also the guy from Sheffield, England. Collier repeatedly compares it to Detroit because they are of a similar size and both  lost a great deal of their industrial base over the last 50 years. This book is intended to be read by the layman. Collier could certainly bury the reader with obscure terms, but he does not. Instead, he uses plenty of real world examples of well-known companies (Toy

BEING THERE by Jerzy Kosinski

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Originally published in 1970. I did not know this was a novel until just a few months ago when I found my copy of this book in a thrift shop. I was familiar with the 1979 movie starring Peter Sellers in an Academy Award-nominated performance, but had no idea it was originally a book. A little research has told me that this book has a troubled history. The author, Jerzy Kosinski, plagiarized the book. The original book was a Polish author from the 1920's and 1930's named Tadeusz Dolega-Mostowicz.  He died at the beginning of World War II while fighting the Soviet Union during the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland in 1939. His book was called The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma .  Being There follows the adventures of Chance, an uneducated gardener who works for an elderly rich man. Chance is probably on the autistic spectrum and has grown up in the rich man's household. He knows nothing about the outside world except for what he has seen on television. However, he has an in

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY of the UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn

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Originally published in 1980 by HarperCollins.  Multiple updated editions have been printed. Howard Zinn's (1922-2010)  A People's History of the United States   is perhaps the most famous and most controversial history book in publication today.  I read this book because the former governor of my home state of Indiana and current President of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, repeatedly criticized it and actually advocated blocking its use in public schools in Indiana, including Indiana University. Governor Daniels used to be a frequent guest on a local newstalk radio station in Indianapolis and this book came up enough times in the conversations that I became aware of it. Before that I had never heard of it - but he certainly put it on my radar. That's not really what he had intended, I am sure. I found my copy of A People's History of the United States in a local thrift shop on a half price day, which made this book a true bargain at $1. I decided that, as a good

THE BLUE and the GRAY: THE CONFLICT BETWEEN NORTH and SOUTH by Martin F. Graham, Richard A. Sauers and George Skoch.

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Published in 1997 by Publications International, LTD. Union General Ambrose Burnside (1824-1881) At first glance, this is a typical coffee table book about the Civil War. There are tons of them - I ought to know, I own several myself. They are all over-sized, hardback and full of great pictures. Most have lots of details about the battles and the strategies of the war and a little about topics such as the daily life of the soldier, medicine of the time, the use of spies or daily life in camp. This book is set up exactly in the reverse. It is all about those other topics, discusses the overall strategy and offers very little about the specifics of any actual battles. There are literally no battle maps. But, that doesn't stop this from being a great book. It is a great book precisely because it doesn't treat those other topics as interesting filler - it treats them as topics that can stand alone and are worthy of exploration.  Every page is colored either blue or gr

SUICIDE of THE WEST: HOW the REBIRTH of POPULISM, NATIONALISM, and IDENTITY POLITICS IS DESTROYING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (audiobook) by Jonah Goldberg

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Published by Random House Audio in 2018. Read by the author, Jonah Goldberg. Duration: 16 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Jonah Goldberg, noted political commentator and an editor at the conservative political magazine National Review , takes a long time to set up his argument that modern West culture and its economic system, as it developed under the Enlightenment, is unique and worthy of preservation. He goes on an in-depth look at the conditions that brought about the Enlightenment and makes some reasonable conclusions - certainly nothing that was earth-shaking. But, he makes them in easily understandable terms because this is not a poli-sci or an economics textbook - this is the political version on an evangelistic tract trying to sell the citizens of The West, particularly Americans, that their political and economic culture is worthy of saving, even if it is imperfect. Goldberg spends a great deal of time pointing out that the vast majority of human history has been the s