I just finished Poverty, By America. It's really moving and seemingly well-researched and honest.
I don't know if I'll stick with it. I don't have a good track record of sticking with social activism stuff. Deep-down in my bones I know however that poverty is wrong and really doesn't need to exist at the levels we have collectively accepted as "natural".
On the same note I’d recommend Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.
Written in research driven prose, it details the relationships between a handfull of landlords and tenants in some of the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee.
The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht. It taught me that there is indeed a direction for society to go beyond PostModernism, that is constructive and nuanced. Also explained why it is so rare for people to move into such a stage of development.
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Showed all of the archaeological evidence for vast time periods where alternate governance models were put into practice, and how the history of progress that we are given is not the whole story. Useful for seeing that we are in a local minim, and can evolve into something better.
Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. Goes through the diaries and historical evidence of the early interactions with Australia's Aboriginals. Shows how over time their agricultural practices, towns and living environments were destroyed and replaced with a narrative that they were backwards and not using the land. Good example of how sustainable practices can look like unused natural spaces, and thus dismissed as poor uses of space.
The foundational text of this view, Progress & Poverty, is an absolute masterpiece. No book has shifted my thinking so radically, and I know I’m not an outlier.
Fun fact: It was written in San Francisco after the gold rush when there was obscene wealth around but horrible wealth inequality. This yielded awful urban living conditions, which George set out to investigate. Sounds familiar...
Thanks again. I suppose in that case I'll read one of the books based on the recommendations in this thread.
I often think that in the west we're actually closer to a post-scarcity society than people tend to imagine. Yes I know, that seems radical and heartless: what about the poor? Well, there sure is still a gap between rich and poor, but when you drill in to the material gap between rich and average, it starts to look less interesting. Bill Gates wears the same clothes as the average middle class person, he uses the same technology, eats the same food, he has basically the same access to mobility (private jets and yachts being a small increase in convenience but not an increase in access to locations which is what really matters), he probably takes one or two vacations a year like an ordinary person and so on.
The big differentiators between the life of a reasonably well off middle class person and a billionaire are the size/quality of their house, possibly the education of their children (but even that's a rather nuanced question given the prevalence of scholarships and state funding), and ownership of private vehicles. Maybe a bit of jewellery or art that nobody can really tell apart from much cheaper pieces unless they're for some reason an expert. And of course how they spend their time: investing and philanthropy, but let's say that's not in and of itself a big change in quality of life.
In most other respects you wouldn't know the difference and certainly the number of ways the lives of the average person differs from those at the very top have shrunk dramatically since, say, the middle ages or the 19th century.
In this worldview current trends are a predictable consequence of post-scarcity society: the rise of things like Instagram influencers, a huge class of aimless 'elites' who invariably claim to have expansive yet vague social goals, the frequency of purity spirals and so on. When your material needs are all met, your society has failed at elevating other cultures to your levels of wealth (thinking here of "bringing freedom" to Iraq/Afghanistan etc), and your society has nowhere remaining to explore physically, what is there left to do than fight over power and attention? To the extent the Culture novels explore these themes, then I guess they would interest me indeed.
For the former, I'd recommend chapter three of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks & White Liberals, about the history of slavery.[1]
For the latter, I'd recommend Illiberal Reformers, about the Progressive Era and its devotees.[2] Later Progressives were responsible for the school-to-prison pipeline and militarized police.[3] The Progressive Era has a wide array of interesting literature, including the writings of many of its early exponents (since they tended to be writers or academics).
Will definitely check this out. I find books that take a 50,000ft view of human development deeply insightful even if I don't entire agree with their theses.
Obligatory pitch for The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
By: David Graeber, David Wengrow
which is a whole book about the challenging of the "Necessity of Cities" and "Agriculture Ends the Good Life" memes, as well as a few others that go mostly unchallenged in history books.
A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state", political violence, and social inequality—revealing new possibilities for human emancipation
The Elusive Quest for Growth by W. Easterly -- read it when I was in college hoping to study development (poverty, growth) economics; changed the way I look at poverty, economics and politics in general. Likewise I helped me ditch modern liberalism for classical one.
Check out Jared Diamonds book 'The world until yesterday'
Looking at how some other non-industrialised societies do stuff and is there anything useful we can take from them. There's a chapter on childrearing
I recommend “Against the Grain” and also “Pre Industrial Societies.” They give a really good perspective on human life and the structures we create. One of my favourite quotes is: the hallmarks of a state: appropriation, inequality and hierarchy.
Grains are the only agricultural product that can grow an early state, because it can be easily taxed, it’s fungible so you can pay with it, and people can’t run off with their field and canals to somewhere else.
It’s kind of a wonderful point that without the taxman there would be no civilisation.
they have very helpful history in understanding how poverty is manufactured, within the context of colonial capitalism.
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