10 Books That Explain Economic Reality for Progressives
Don't look to the Wall Street Journal or billionaire owned media outlets o explain the current economic realities in the US and the world at large. Take a minute to investigate these powerhouse books that explore and explain the infuriating. manipulation of the politics and culture of the 21st century to enrich. the privileged few and exploit the rest of us.
- Burned by Billionaires - The New Press - Collins’ Burned by Billionaires is a searing, meticulously researched indictment of wealth inequality that left me equal parts enraged and energized. The book’s opening statistic—comparing billionaire yachts’ carbon emissions to Burundi’s entire population—immediately shattered any illusions of “harmless” excess. As someone concerned about climate justice and democracy, I found Collins’ synthesis of economic, ecological, and political analysis revelatory.
- Dark Money by Jane Mayer: 9780307947901 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books- Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?
- Vulture Capitalism | Book by Grace Blakeley | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster - In the vein of The Shock Doctrine and Evil Geniuses, this timely manifesto from an acclaimed journalist illustrates how corporate and political elites have used planned capitalism to advance their own interests at the expense of the rest of us—and how we can take back our economy for all.
- Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It | Verso Books - t's no secret that "the 1%" - the business elite that commands the largest corporations and the connected network of public and private institutionsexercise enormous control over U.S. government. While this control is usually attributed to campaign donations and lobbying, Levers of Power argues that corporate power derives from control over the economic resources on which daily life depends. Government officials must constantly strive to keep capitalists happy, lest they go on "capital strike" - that is, refuse to invest in particular industries or locations, or move their holdings to other countries - and therefore impose material hardship on specific groups or the economy as a whole. For this reason, even politicians who are not dependent on corporations for their electoral success must fend off the interruption of corporate investment.
- Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank | Moon Palace Books- In Pity the Billionaire, Frank, the chronicler of American paradox, examines the peculiar mechanism by which dire economic circumstances have delivered the current set of seemingly unexpected political results. Using firsthand reporting, a deep knowledge of the American Right, and a wicked sense of humor, he gives us a diagnosis of the cultural malady that has transformed collapse into profit, reconceived the Founding Fathers as heroes from an Ayn Rand novel, and enlisted the powerless in a fan club for the prosperous.
- Kleptopia – HarperCollins - In this shocking, meticulously reported work of narrative nonfiction, an award-winning investigative journalist exposes “capitalism’s monster”—global kleptocracy—and reveals how it is corrupting the world around us. They are everywhere, the thieves and their people. Masters of secrecy. Until now we have detected their presence only by what they leave behind. A body in a burned-out Audi. Workers riddled with bullets in the Kazakh Desert. A rigged election in Zimbabwe. A British banker silenced and humiliated for trying to expose the truth about the City of London.
- Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum: 9780593449295 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books - We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this wasn’t always the case. Though for most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and, for two hundred years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity.
- Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond: 9780593239933 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books - The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
- Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality | City Lights Booksellers & Publishers - From the Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling coauthor of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism , candid reflections on the economist’s craft When economist Angus Deaton immigrated to the United States from Britain in the early 1980s, he was awed by America’s strengths and shocked by the extraordinary gaps he witnessed between people. Economics in America explains in clear terms how the field of economics addresses the most pressing issues of our time—from poverty, retirement, and the minimum wage to the ravages of the nation’s uniquely disastrous health care system—and narrates Deaton’s account of his experiences as a naturalized US citizen and academic economist.
- Raising the Floor by Andy Stern & Lee Kravitz | Hachette Book Group - Advances in technology are creating the next economy and enabling us to make things/do things/connect with others in smarter, cheaper, faster, more effective ways. But the price of this progress has been a decoupling of the engine of prosperity from jobs that have been the means by which people have ascended to (and stayed in) the middle class.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇