Overview Evicted is a heartwrenching, powerful ethnography by Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond. It chronicles the lives of eight Milwaukee families living in poverty, with sometimes upwards of 80% of their income going to rent. And, as you can imagine, these tenants aren’t living like royalty. Indeed, violence, drugs and poor schools plague their neighborhoods, and roaches […]
Tag: economics
A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System
Overview The U.S. tax code is a mess and is in dire need of updating. In A Fine Mess, T.R. Reid examines tax innovations around the world, our convoluted tax code, and how we can improve it. Imagine if we could lower income tax rates for everyone, cure the nightmare that is tax season, and raise […]
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Overview To begin with, this is probably the most difficult book I’ve ever read. It’s extremely academic and required note-taking to understand. If you decide to read Capital, keep that in mind. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing, well-thought-out (it took fifteen years to write) and somewhat provocative. We all have heard about the dangers of skyrocketing income and […]
March
Book 9: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics I was a teaching assistant for an introductory management information systems course from 2015-2016. We don’t discuss physics often in this course, as you can imagine. In my office hours, a student once asked something like, “how do electrons flow through devices to deliver information to the user?” […]