Do You Enjoy Reading? Economic Inequality-- (Almost) The Whole Story

Over the weekend, CNN published a crowd-sourced list of the 99-- like in the 99%-- must-reads on income inequality. The titles that are linked are available online or are avilable in the DWT online book store.

1. "The Price of Inequality," by Joseph Stiglitz

2. "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," by John Perkins

3. "Player Piano," by Kurt Vonnegut (Vonnegut's first novel; according to the back cover, it's a "chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines.")

4. "Economic Growth and Income Inequality", by Simon Kuznets

5. "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else," by Chrystia Freeland

6. "The Unwinding," by George Packer

7. "A Tale of Two Cities," by Charles Dickens (Heard of him?)

8. "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand ("I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.")

9. "How Class Works," animation, by Richard Wolff

10. "Random Family," by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

11. "Behind Beautiful Forevers," by Katherine Boo (The Pulitzer-winner explores inequality in Mumbai's "undercity.")

12. "Highly profitable companies..." by Matthew Yglesias, Slate

13. "In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters," NYTimes.com map (National map shows a poor kid's odds of climbing to the top of the income ladder, by location.)

14. "A Framework for Understanding Poverty," by Ruby Payne

15. "The Big Sort," by Bill Bishop

16. The Bible (James, Chapters 2 and 5, and the books of Job and John were recommended. From James: "Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, 'Here's a good seat for you,' but say to the poor man, 'You stand there' or 'Sit on the floor by my feet,' have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?")

17. "The Other America," by Michael Harrington

18. "The One Percent," documentary by Jamie Johnson (The Johnson & Johnson heir is pretty good at biting the hand that feeds him.)

19. "Progress and Poverty," by Henry George

20. "Winner Take All Politics," by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

21. "The Haves and the Have-Nots," by Branko Milanovic

22. "A Theory of Justice," by John Rawls

23. "Park Avenue" documentary, by Alex Gibney (New York's Park Avenue is home to enormous wealth and excruciating poverty.)

24. "Wealth Inequality in America," YouTube video

25. "Inequality and New York's Subway," by The New Yorker (This is fascinating in its minimalism. See median household incomes mapped by subway stop.)

26. "Nickel and Dimed," by Barbara Ehrenreich (Just read it. The author tries to live on low-wage jobs and finds it's nearly impossible. Heartfelt and so well-written.)

27. "The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger," by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

28. "Wealth of Nations," by Adam Smith

29. "The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism," by George Bernard Shaw

30. "740 Park," by Michael Gross (Gross examines one of the richest buildings in the world.)

31. "Savage Inequalities," by Jonathan Kozol

32. "The Jungle," by Upton Sinclair

33. Podcast on the "Economics of Enough"

34. "America the Beautiful," by Ben Carson

35. Nick Hanauer's TED Talk on income inequality (video up top)

36. "The Case for Happiness-Based Economics," by Kentaro Toyama

37. "Superclass," by David Rothkopf

38. "Love and Capital," by Mary Gabriel

39. "Why the rich don't give to charity," by Ken Stern, The Atlantic ("One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans-- those with earnings in the top 20%-- contributed on average 1.3% of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid-- those in the bottom 20 percent-- donated 3.2% of their income.")

40. The Poverty Clinic, by Paul Tough, The New Yorker

41. "The House I Live In," documentary by Eugene Jarecki

42. "Screwed," by Thom Hartmann

43. "Richistan," by Robert Frank

44. "You Call This Democracy?" by Paul Kivel

45. "The Conscience of a Liberal," by Paul Krugman

46. "The Wretched of the Earth," by Frantz Fanon

47. "Reckless Endangerment," by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner

48. "Ill Fares the Land," by Tony Judt

49. "The FairTax Book," by Neal Boortz (Wanna get rid of the IRS? Here's your book.)

50. "Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945" by Thomas Hungerford, for the Congressional Research Service

51. "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts," by Karl Marx

52. "The Grapes of Wrath," by John Steinbeck

53. "The American Way of Eating," by Tracie McMillan

54. "Animal Farm," by George Orwell ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.")

55. "How much inequality is necessary for growth," by Fuad Hasanov and Oded Izraeli, Harvard Business Review ("Although our findings suggest that modest increases can generate growth, other data indicate that heightened inequality shortens growth spells and may halt growth. Reducing inequality, though, has clear benefits over time: It strengthens people's sense that society is fair, improves social cohesion and mobility, and broadens support for growth initiatives. Policies that aim for growth but ignore inequality may ultimately be self-defeating, then, whereas policies that decrease inequality by, say, boosting employment and education have beneficial effects on the human capital that modern economies increasingly need.")

56. "The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions," by Thorstein Veblen

57. "Orange is the New Black," Netflix series

58. "Wage Inequality and the Rise in Returns to Skill," by Chinhui Juhn et al

59. "Rules for Radicals," by Saul Alinsky

60. "Mayday for America's Middle Class," by Hedrick Smith ("If America is going to get beyond paralyzing gridlock and dangerous brinkmanship in the budget battles this fall, what's needed is a shift in the economic mind-set that has dominated Washington for three decades. To paraphrase what Albert Einstein reportedly said at the dawn of the Atomic Age in 1945: You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.")

61. "Why Nations Fail," by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

62. "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-2002," by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez

63. "Unequal Democracy," by Larry Bartels

64. "Wealth and Poverty," George Gilder

65. "Rich Schools, Poor Schools," by Arthur Wise

66. The Catechism of the Catholic Church-- Social Justice (A reader suggested Chapter 2, Article 3. One excerpt: "Socio-economic problems can be resolved only with the help of all the forms of solidarity: solidarity of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples. International solidarity is a requirement of the moral order; world peace depends in part upon this.")

67. Dorothea Lange's photography (Think Dust Bowl.)

68. "The Working Poor: Invisible in America," by David Shipler

69. "All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America," by Joel Berg

70. "Targeting the Wealthy Kills Jobs," by T.J. Rodgers, Wall Street Journal

71. "If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?" by G.A. Cohen

72. The Inequality Issue of The Economist

73. "The Capitalist Revolution," by Peter L. Berger

74. "Getting Rich: America's New Rich and How They Got That Way," by Lisa A. Keister

75. "13 Bankers," by Simon Johnson and James Kwak

76. "The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity," by Michael Marmot

77. "Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America," by Cynthia Duncan

78. "America: What Went Wrong," by the Philadelphia Inquirer (This 1990s newspaper series really stuck one reader, who wrote in an e-mail to me that "it took my breath away when I read it as a young man in my late 20's; and it continues to have a profound impact on my thinking today-- particularly about concerns over the American middle class.")

79. "Out of this furnace," by Thomas Bell

80. "Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade Off" by Arthur Okun

81. "The New Good Life," by John Robbins

82. "Workonomics" section of Upworthy.com (Engineered for clickability, with headlines like, "Hey Broke People: This Statistic Will Piss You Off.")

83. "The United States of Inequality" video, BillMoyers.com

84. Monty Python clip on "Constitutional Peasants" ("Oh, there you go, bringing class into it again ...")



85. "The Other Wes Moore," by Wes Moore (From an online book description: "Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other. Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods; both hung out on street corners with their crews; both ran into trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence? Wes Moore, the author of this fascinating book, sets out to answer this profound question.")

86. "Moral Man and Immoral Society," by Reinhold Niebuhr

87. "The Politics of Rich and Poor," by Kevin Phillips

88. "A Modest Proposal," by Jonathan Swift

89. "Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality," by Benjamin I. Page and Lawrence R. Jacobs

90. "Five American Authors on Wealth Poverty and Inequality," by Ichiro Kawachi and Philippa Howden Chapman

91. "Caesar's Column," by Ignatius Donnelly

92. "The Time Machine," by H.G. Wells

93. "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," by David Graeber

94. "The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald ("The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.")

95. "How Unequal Can America Get," YouTube of Robert Reich (video below)

96. "Twilight of the Elites," by Christopher Hayes

97. "Third World America," by Arianna Huffington

98. "It's the inequality, stupid," by Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot, Mother Jones ("A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90% of us? $31,244.")

99. "The Maximum Wage," by Sam Pizzigati

Holidays Are Always A Good Time To Curl Up With A Good Book-- Here Are Some Suggestions From Some Members Of Congress

I hope you get a chance to visit the DWT book store and music shop from time to time. In it you'll find the books we've been reading and enjoying enough to recommend, from Idiot America, Bloggers On The Bus, Blinded By The Right and Dateline Havana to Family of Secrets, The Progressive Revolution and Nixonland. These are books you see Ken and I referring to and quoting from over and over again. Fortunately, not everyone reads the same books. If that were the case the blog would be Up With Tyranny and we'd be supporting mindless political zombies like Mitt Romney, Virginia Foxx and Michele Bachmann.

As a special holiday treat I want to share some favorite books that some of our favorite members of Congress told us they've found inspiring over the years. Many people are eager to know what makes Alan Grayson (D-FL) tick so they can encourage other Democratic office holders to eat, listen to or read whatever makes him the way he is. Long ago we bonded on our mutual admiration for Joni Mitchell and both of us are big fans of Ladies of the Canyon, "not only," writes Alan, for 'The Circle Game,' or 'Big Yellow Taxi,' or 'For Free,' but also, of course, for 'Woodstock,' which contains a beautiful line that I think about all the time: 'Life is for learning.'"

When it comes to books, he brought up one I hadn't read, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?by Philip K. Dick. Alan is inspired by what he calls "Dick's exploration of what separates human beings from 'replicants' (i.e., human-like robots). His answer: empathy. I think that President Obama came to the same conclusion in his first Supreme Court nomination." Not a word about Paul Broun (R-GA).

Congressman Joe Sestak (D-PA) is running for the Senate seat currently occupied by Republican crossover artist Arlen Spectre. I've known Joe for almost five years and he's a thoughtful, scholarly man (as well as a fighter and, until recently, a career Naval officer), who spoke about his fascination with The Ambition and the Power: The Fall of Jim Wright

The book is very revealing of a turning point in the environment in Washington. Having talked with Members of Congress who were in office during Wright's tenure as Speaker of the House, they confirm that the efforts to take Wright down were the beginning of a severely strained relationship between the two major parties. Since that time, we have really had a "Speaker of the Caucus" instead of a Speaker of the House who can bring Democrats and Republicans together.

I think that the constant partisan bickering is one of the reasons so many Americans have lost faith in their government and that needs to change. We need to be able to have a candid discussion and hear every side of an issue, but at the end of the day know that it is about what is right for this nation, not for a political party.

Another member of Congress who people seek out when they're looking for wisdom and serious mental acuity is Jerrold Nadler, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Just this month he co-sponsored a bill, The Effective Death Penalty Appeals Act (which will help prevent the execution of possibly innocent people where there is new evidence of lack of guilt). I mention the bill because it's related to a book he treasures, one he told us is "one of the seminal books of my life:" Not Guilty. He read it as a teenager in the 1960's and now it's something still informing his life as a constitutional scholar. "The book," he explained, "was begun by Judge Jerome Frank and finished posthumously by his daughter, Barbara, and published in 1957. Not Guilty examined over 20 individual case studies, going back to the 1930s and ‘40s, in which people served more than 15 years in prison before they were definitively proven innocent.

“The book asks the question:  Why does this happen?  In some of these cases, there were clear mistakes.  For example, in at least one case, the police beat a confession out of a wrongly accused person. And, in many of the cases, people supposedly did everything right but, because of their resemblance to someone who committed a crime, they were identified by eyewitnesses.

"Not Guilty taught me that there is no perfection in justice, and that I had a moral responsibility to oppose capital punishment.”

Raise your hand if you think House Judiciary Committee members Lamar Smith (R-TX), Dan Lungren (R-CA), Steve King (R-IA), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Trent Franks (R-AZ) or Louie Gohmert (R-TX) has read this book-- or would?

The congressman consistently identified by House staffers as the most intelligent member of Congress is Barney Frank. I wasn't surprised when he came up with several books, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemmaby Charles Hamilton and Taylor Branch's 3 stupendous books about America in the time of Martin Luther King, Jr: Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68, and Pillar of Fire : America in the King Years 1963-65. Barney:

"Adam Clayton Powell was the third African American member of Congress, but the first to insist on being treated fairly. For me, the book was a model about how to be an openly gay man while serving in Congress.

"Unlike simplistic images of King, Branch's books present him as both a moral leader and a brilliant political strategist. King was passionate about the ideals in which he believed and was also able to operate in the real world in order to achieve them."

Sounds familiar! Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) sends us down an entirely different trail with Three Cups of Teaby Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. I imagine the book has helped provide a context for the senator to evaluate the plethora of information she's getting on a daily basis about Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is what she wrote us about why the book is meaningful to her:

Three Cups of Tea is the inspiring true story of Greg Mortenson who, after failing to climb to the summit of K2, found himself rejuvenated by the generosity of the villagers of a small and very poor Pakistani town. They took him in and fed him and in return Greg decided then and there that he would come back to build a school for the children of the village. That was 1993. Since then, Greg founded the Central Asia Institute and has built 55 schools in poor villages in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. This area is prime recruiting territory for both al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and Mortenson's schools are offering both boys and girls the sort of education that serves as an antidote to the intolerance and extremism that is taught in the madrassas. Three Cups of Tea eloquently demonstrates the difference one person can make in so many people's lives-- and the world-- by simply seeing a need and caring enough to act on it. That, for me, is precisely what public service is all about.

I suspect it isn't something that would interest Rudi Giuliani... not even a little.

Oregon's freshman senator, Jeff Merkley usually strikes people who meet him as a blue color kind of everyman. Don't judge the cover of that "book" in a way that leads you to believe he doesn't read any. Jeff is widely read and immediately brought up an American classic that has helped him understand and cope with the tough times of the working families who sent him to Washington. "A book," he told us last week, "that I found really meaningful was The Grapes of Wrath . Reading the stories and learning the challenges of the families in the book reminded me of my family history.  They also moved from the mid-west to the west searching for work and an escape from poverty during the Great Depression.”  

Another freshman Democrat with a deep and wide passion for reading books is Colorado's Jared Polis. We're both big R.E.M. fans and he told me his iPod is filled with songs by Peter, Paul and Mary, John Denver and They Might Be Giants. His favorite book, is one I'm proud to say that I read in Spanish, Don Quijote by Miguel Cervantes. "It's a wonderful novel of idealism," enthused Jared, "with a theme of exploring what defines reality." Fellow freshman, Jim Himes (D-CT) brought up a book he says has been very meaningful to him, a book I hadn't heard of before: Their Eyes Were Watching God. "Zora Neal Hurston wrote the book and it means a lot to me because of its recognition of the divine spark in all of us."

Feel like reading? I have 4 autographed copies of Jeffrey Feldman's book, Framing The Debate and I'm going to send it to the first four people who donate at least $25 to any of our candidates who voted against the supplemental war budget to fund escalating the war in Afghanistan. If you want to donate and don't want the book, just add one cent to your contribution and I won't send it.

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