Bathsheba Demuth is a historian and prize-winning writer, interested in how people, ideas, places, and other-than-human species intersect in the far north. Her interest in these subjects began when she was 18 and spent several years in the Yukon, mushing huskies, hunting caribou, fishing for salmon, and otherwise learning to survive in the taiga and tundra. Now, when not in the Arctic, she lives in Rhode Island, where she is a professor at Brown University.
Any discussion of how people and nature relate to each other in the twenty-first century will come up against the issue of climate change. And there are so many good books to read on the topic – Elizabeth Rush’s Rising comes right to mind, or the collection All We Can Save, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson. What Tale of Two Planets offers is a global perspective on rising seas, changing seasons, and damaging weather through genres from poetry to prose to fiction. Each author brings clarity to the science and politics of climate change, but the sections here are also portraits of love for place and community. If you’ve never read a book on climate change before, it’s a great start; if you’ve read them all, there’s something new and beautiful here.
Building from his acclaimed anthology Tales of Two Americas, beloved writer and editor John Freeman draws together a group of our greatest writers from around the world to help us see how the environmental crisis is hitting some of the most vulnerable communities where they live.
In the past five years, John Freeman, previously editor of Granta, has launched a celebrated international literary magazine, Freeman's, and compiled two acclaimed anthologies that deal with income inequality as it is experienced. In the course of this work, one major theme came up repeatedly: Climate change is making already dire inequalities much worse,…
I trained as a chartered public finance accountant because I have a mathematics degree and I wanted to work in public service. After 20 years of that I became a freelance consultant and got into teaching public financial management after volunteering for a project in South Sudan. I have taught here in the UK and in other countries, including Kazakhstan, South Sudan, Uganda, and Sri Lanka. The lack of a good textbook about managing public money that was not aimed at accountants led me to write one in 2010. The third edition of it will be published in 2023. (I am still waiting for my novel to find a publisher.)
Billy Bragg has long been my favourite musician. I have all his albums including his 1986 offering, Talking With the Taxman About Poetry.
I included this book because it is about the importance of accountability. This is an important concept for managing public money. The wish for our governments to operate in an honest and fair way requires there being a way to judge their performance. This means that the politicians, civil servants, and everyone else who is involved in government must be willing to be accountable for what they do, and also for what they omit to do. When I teach public financial management I say to my students that if they do not want to be accountable for their actions they should not work in public service.
At a time when opinion trumps facts and truth is treated as nothing more than another perspective, free speech has become a battleground. While authoritarians and algorithms threaten democracy, we argue over who has the right to speak.
To protect ourselves from encroaching tyranny, we must look beyond this one-dimensional notion of what it means to be free and, by reconnecting liberty to equality and accountability, restore the individual agency engendered by the three dimensions of freedom.
There are many big problems in the world today–racism, war, climate change, unaccountable governments, exploitative corporations, and so on. But when you scratch the surface of almost any serious problem, what you find is that the root of the problem is inequality: a minority of people are rich and powerful, while those who suffer the most are typically poor and powerless. I’m so passionate about inequality because, in my eyes, it constitutes the heart and soul of what’s wrong with our world and the key to making things better.
Thomas Piketty rose to international fame for his 2014 Capital in the Twenty-First Century. But this book is even better. At a whopping 1000 pages, it’s a magnum opus. A phenomenally interesting panoramic of inequality across human history.
With intricate detail and voluminous evidence, Piketty documents the rise and fall of inequality throughout the ages, depicting the ways in which ideologies have worked to bolster or undermine it. Anyone who reads this book will walk away with a far richer understanding of some of the core dynamics underlying human history.
A New York Times Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year
The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.
Thomas Piketty's bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left…
As an economist at the European Commission, Adjunct Professor in Paris, former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and now a first-time author, I thrive at the intersection of academia, think-tanks, and policy-making. My academic soul leads me to seek answers to the big questions: what is economic growth and how does it relate to the success of civilization, to science and technology, to people’s wellbeing, and to nature. My practical focus leads me to draw the policy implications of all this for how we ought to fight climate change. My critics accuse me of being an optimist. I take it as a compliment: the future of humanity is in our hands.
We intuitively understand that decarbonization and social justice are deeply interwoven as 21st-century challenges.
Dr. Chancel’s book shows us in great detail how this is the case, and therefore why it is important to keep inequalities in mind when designing policies to accelerate the decarbonization of the economy. After all, the poor are also more exposed to the catastrophic events associated with climate change.
But perhaps my greatest takeaway was looking at the problem the other way around, meaning that Chancel also shows us how tackling social inequalities can actually help us address some environmental challenges.
A hardheaded book that confronts and outlines possible solutions to a seemingly intractable problem: that helping the poor often hurts the environment, and vice versa.
Can we fight poverty and inequality while protecting the environment? The challenges are obvious. To rise out of poverty is to consume more resources, almost by definition. And many measures to combat pollution lead to job losses and higher prices that mainly hurt the poor. In Unsustainable Inequalities, economist Lucas Chancel confronts these difficulties head-on, arguing that the goals of social justice and a greener world can…
It has long been claimed that we face a choice between freedom and equality: that advocates of capitalism favour freedom, while critics prioritise equality. Philosopher Raoul Martinez was never persuaded by this claim, yet it took years of research across a number of disciplines to understand not only how problematic it is, but how foundational to our society and its crises it has become. His journey of discovery culminated in the writing of Creating Freedom, which dismantles this misleading narrative while deepening our understanding of human liberty: the many ways it is subverted and the path to its creation.
Having read Robert Nozick’s philosophical defence of free markets, Anarchy, State and Utopia, in my early twenties, I started searching for a comprehensive rebuttal. With Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, my search came to an end. Cohen — who sadly is no longer with us — was a gifted analytical philosopher who developed his critique of Nozick and other free marketeers over many years. The book delivers a clear and powerful distillation of his thought, which corroborates the intuition felt by many of us that there is something profoundly wrong with the conflation of freedom with free markets.
In this book G. A. Cohen examines the libertarian principle of self-ownership, which says that each person belongs to himself and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else. This principle is used to defend capitalist inequality, which is said to reflect each person's freedom to do as as he wishes with himself. The author argues that self-ownership cannot deliver the freedom it promises to secure, thereby undermining the idea that lovers of freedom should embrace capitalism and the inequality that comes with it. He goes on to show that the standard Marxist condemnation of exploitation implies an endorsement…
Since I was a student, I have been fascinated with social and economic inequality–the more so because back then, my professors seemed to disregard this subject of study. So, I made it one of my own main areas of research: I simply needed to understand more about the nature and the causes of inequality in human societies. In recent years, I have been busy researching economic inequality in different historical settings, also looking at specific socioeconomic strata. I began with the poor, and more recently, I focused on the rich. In my list of recommendations, I included books that, I believe, are particularly insightful concerning wealth and the wealthy.
In this book, Walter Scheidel proficiently exploits the new information that we now have available about wealth inequality in the past to make one bold claim: across history, only catastrophes and large-scale violence (the “Great Leveler”) could significantly reduce economic inequality. Otherwise, the concentration of political power and of coercive force in a few hands also led wealth to become ever more concentrated.
This is a rather depressing view, with which I partially disagree for scientific reasons (as it downplays the importance of human agency and of our collective choices).
Nevertheless, I love this book for its scope, its ambition, and the treasure trove of information about the Classical Age and non-Western societies and cultures that it brings to the debate on wealth inequality in human history.
Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that it never dies peacefully. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling-mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues-have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Today, the violence that reduced inequality…
We talk a lot about the big public events that expanded the #MeToo movement so astronomically, like the election to the US presidency of a man who bragged about assaulting women, and the allegations made against Harvey Weinstein. But I think most American women have other, more personal beefs that originate from their being a woman. I, for one, was shocked at how unnecessarily difficult it was to be a new mother in the US. Other places support this vulnerable group much more than we do here, and living that disparity angered me—like, for example, when my husband exhausted what little parental leave he had available before our twins were even released from the NICU.
In my book, the protagonist Harriet gets more and more pissed about a whole range of things, one being the fact that she’s got to do so much more than her husband Theo when it comes to the work of running their household.
In All the Rage, Darcy Lockman shows just how pervasive this reality is, and how deeply inconsistent it is with the worldviews of the women and men who find themselves stuck it. This mom-heavy imbalance of household labor is a breaking of a promise, in a way—one that so many of us went into our marriage with, and that remains an ongoing source of tension not only in my book but in homes across the US.
Why do men do so little at home? Why do women do so much? Why don't our egalitarian values match our lived experiences?
Journalist-turned-psychologist Darcy Lockman offers a clear-eyed look at the most pernicious problem facing modern parents-how progressive relationships become traditional ones when children are introduced into the household.
In an era of seemingly unprecedented feminist activism, enlightenment, and change, data shows that one area of gender inequality stubbornly persists: the disproportionate amount of parental work that falls to women, no matter their background, class, or professional status. All the Rage investigates the cause of this pervasive inequity to…
I'm an author, advisor, speaker, podcaster, and citizen concerned about humanity’s relationship with advanced artificial intelligence. After following developments in AI for many years, I noticed a disconnect between the rapid rate of progress in AI and the public’s understanding of what was happening. The AI issue affects everyone, so I want everyone to be empowered to learn more about how AI will have a large impact on their lives. As a senior policy advisor and a member of the Board of Advisors for Canada's leading safety and governance network, books such as these help me stay informed about the latest developments in advanced artificial intelligence. I hope my recommendations will help you to critically consider how humans should co-exist with this revolutionary technology.
AI algorithms are increasingly used to decide what you see, if you’re hired, and who you match with socially or romantically.
There is much cause for concern because many of these algorithms are biased and return responses that indicate some degree of sexism or racism.
The main value of this book is that all those issues are recognized, but so is the notion that when an algorithm is biased, it is much easier to discover that and correct it than with a person.
Consequently, reforming algorithms likely presents a better option to reduce bias when people or things are sorted or assessed.
Much has been written about the challenges tech presents to equality and democracy. But we can either criticize big data and automation or steer it to do better. Lobel makes a compelling argument that while we cannot stop technological development, we can direct its course according to our most fundamental values.
With provocative insights in every chapter, Lobel masterfully shows that digital technology frequently has a comparative advantage over humans in detecting discrimination, correcting historical exclusions, subverting long-standing stereotypes, and addressing the world's thorniest problems: climate, poverty, injustice, literacy, accessibility, speech, health, and safety.
I believe in democracy. I think the US has the opportunity to be the world’s first multicultural and inclusive democracy. And I think that’s a very, very hard thing to do. I’ve been writing about democracy through the lens of presidential history my whole career, and I think the US has done some things so impressively well while at the same time it frustratingly keeps failing to live up to its own ideals. The tensions and contradictions in our history as we try to expand and enact those ideas are endlessly fascinating. And I’m nervous that we may be seeing the end of a national commitment to democracy.
She’s a super-smart Civil War historian, and this book does something I haven’t seen in a lot of Civil War books—it shows how important the West was to the way the US developed after the Civil War—it wasn’t just that the nation expanded, but she writes about how both the North and South relied on racial hierarchies, and she centers Native Americans, which I think is a really important part of that story.
In this provocative new work, Heather Cox Richardson argues that while the North won the Civil War, ending slavery, oligarchy, and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," the victory was short-lived. Settlers from the East pushed into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The Old South found a new home in the West. Both depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise to a white ruling elite, one that thrived despite the abolition…
There are many big problems in the world today–racism, war, climate change, unaccountable governments, exploitative corporations, and so on. But when you scratch the surface of almost any serious problem, what you find is that the root of the problem is inequality: a minority of people are rich and powerful, while those who suffer the most are typically poor and powerless. I’m so passionate about inequality because, in my eyes, it constitutes the heart and soul of what’s wrong with our world and the key to making things better.
Although many people intuitively recognize that inequality is a serious problem, there is widespread doubt that anything can realistically be done about it. Saez and Zucman–perhaps the two most famous tax economists in the world–demolish this pessimism. In a clear, no-nonsense manner, they demonstrate that tax systems can easily fail but they can also be made to work.
The authors describe how rich people and corporations currently avoid tax, how tax havens function, and, most importantly of all, how an evidence-based tax system can be successfully built to prevent evasion and thereby meaningfully reduce inequality.
Even as they became fabulously wealthy, the rich have seen their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Meanwhile working-class Americans have been asked to pay more. The Triumph of Injustice is a forensic investigation into this dramatic transformation. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists who revolutionised the study of inequality, demonstrate how the super-rich pay a lower tax rate than everybody else. In crystalline prose they dissect the deliberate choices and the sins of indecision that have fuelled this trend: the gradual exemption of capital owners; the surge of a new tax-avoidance industry and, most critically, tax…
