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383. The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Daniel Markovits

Genre:   Nonfiction, Education, Sociology, Economics, Public Policy

448 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The thesis of The Meritocracy Trap by Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits is that our current meritocratic society is ill serving both the winners and losers.  The losers who inhabit the bottom half (or maybe even more than that) of our country have seen their jobs exported or eliminated, see a worse future for their children, and are struggling to survive.  Their once nice towns are turning shabby as their kids move to urban centers or become addicted to opioids.  The winners, those who inhabit the top rungs of society, no longer pass down wealth in the manner of previous generation’s aristocracies.  Instead, they invest mightily in their children from birth through graduate school to become part of the hypercompetitive professional class in a winner take all game.  Having so much invested in their own human capital, modern day meritocratic winners willingly step onto a grueling treadmill of work and competition as this is the only way to maximize their return on investment.  They are left with lots of wealth, but at a steep, soul sucking cost.

Quotes 

“The traditional way of thinking about the conflict between the rich and the rest—as a battle between capital and labor—no longer captures what is really going on.”

 

“The overwhelmingly greater part of the recent increase in the top 1 percent’s aggregate income share is attributable not to a shift of overall income away from labor and in favor of capital, but rather to a shift within labor income, away from the middle class and in favor of elite workers.”

 

My Take

The Meritocracy Trap is one of the most interesting books that I have read in a long time.  Before reading it, I would have reflexively stated that meritocracy is an unalloyed good that brings efficiency and wealth to societies that embrace it.  After reading this book, I’m not so sure.  While my husband and I (both lawyers from an elite law school who are early retirees) escaped the punishing aspects of work described in the book, I do not want my children to pursue careers where they are putative “winners,” but miss out on the things that make life purposeful and meaningful.  I also have a lot of empathy for the “losers” in our country who struggle to keep the American Dream alive and have little chance of entering the top rung.  Markovits made me think about these ideas for a long time after I finished this book; the hallmark of a great read.

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381. Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Malcolm Gladwell

Genre:    Nonfiction, Psychology, Sociology, Science

400 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

In July 2015, a young black woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation in rural Texas. Minutes later she was arrested and jailed. Three days later, she committed suicide in her cell. What went wrong? Talking to Strangers is all about what happens when we encounter people we don’t know, why it often goes awry, and what it says about us.

How do we make sense of the unfamiliar? Why are we so bad at judging someone, reading a face, or detecting a lie? Why do we so often fail to ‘get’ other people?

Quotes 

“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative – to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception – is worse.”

 

“The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly it will crumple under our feet… The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”

 

“Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.”

 

“The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. The same convictions can make us reluctant to take advice from others who cannot know our private thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, or motives, but all too willing to give advice to others based on our views of their past behavior, without adequate attention to their thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and motives. Indeed, the biases documented here may create a barrier to the type of exchanges of information, and especially to the type of careful and respectful listening, that can go a long way to attenuating the feelings of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict.”

 

“Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.”

 

My Take

Like all Malcolm Gladwell books, Talking to Strangers is a fascinating read.  I always learn something new and unexpected from him.  In this book, my main takeaway is that while trusting others and giving strangers the benefit of the doubt can occasionally lead to an unfortunate result, it is the price that we all have to pay to live in a society that works.

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380. Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by: Mark Levin

Author:  Robert A. Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Genre:   Nonfiction, Economics, History, Politics

224 pages, published July 30, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Socialism Sucks, economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell travel to many of the world’s Socialist countries (think Venezula, Cuba and North Korea rather than Sweden and Denmark which are capitalist countries with generous welfare states) to report on the impact of Socialist policies.  The results aren’t pretty.  Lawson and Powell give first hand, colorful reports on how Socialism has impoverished millions of people and decimated once vibrant economies.

Quotes 

“Groucho’s definition of politics is Marxism in a nutshell: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

 

“It wasn’t until the so-called “Marginal Revolution” in the 1880s when three economists, working independently, all concluded that the value of a good is based on what people subjectively think a particular (or “marginal”) unit of that good is worth, which is exactly right. The amount of time or energy it takes to make something doesn’t really matter when it comes to determining its worth. This is tough to grasp, especially for the individuals or company that produced the good and want to sell it for a price that they think is “fair” compensation for their time and labor.”

 

“The low rate of infant mortality is a product of data manipulation. At seventy-two abortions per one hundred births, Cuba has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, and Cuban doctors routinely force women to abort high-risk pregnancies so that Cuba’s bureaucrats can brag about their health statistics. If you correct the data to account for these factors, Cuba’s health statistics look a lot less impressive.”

 

“As economists, we believe that the American government’s half-century-long embargo on Cuba is bad policy, and that without it, we could bring the Cubans more freedom. The embargo has done nothing to undermine Cuba’s abusive Communist regime. Indeed, the Castros have used the embargo—they call it a “blockade”—to blame the United States for Cuba’s poverty rather than admit that socialism doesn’t work. Trade not only promotes economic development, it can open a society to other ideas—in this case, capitalist ones.”

 

“In 1988, the Chinese constitution was amended to officially recognize private property and private business. Before then, the Communist state had been China’s only official employer, with small exceptions. By 1998, the state employed about 60 percent of the working population, and in 2010 it employed only about 19 percent.  China had transitioned from socialism to a form of crony capitalism.”

 

“All told, in less than thirty years, through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and other atrocities, Mao’s Communist government killed more of its own people than any other government in history—possibly as many as eighty million.  The peasants who escaped death found themselves poorer than their ancestors. In 1978, two-thirds of Chinese peasants had incomes lower than they had in the 1950s, one-third had incomes lower than in the 1930s, and the average Chinese person was only consuming two-thirds as many calories as the average person in a developed country.”

 

My Take

As an avowed free marketeer, I read Socialism Sucks as a member of the choir.  I already knew about the failure that is socialism and how its implementation is always at the point of a gun.  This book, however, put some meat on the bones of my ideological beliefs.  This book demonstrates with statistics and examples the true destructive power of socialism.  American socialists (I’m looking at you, Bernie Sanders) have no idea what socialism really is.  This is a book they should read.

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378. Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Suann MacIsaac

Author:   Gary Krist

Genre:   Nonfiction, History, Crime

432 pages, published October 28, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Empire of Sin tells the story of New Orleans in the early 20th century, immersing the reader in a time when commercialized vice, jazz culture, and endemic crime defined the Crescent City.  The book focuses on Tom Anderson who ran New Orleans’ notorious Storyville vice district and fought to keep his empire intact as it was attacked from within and without.  We also learn the stories of flashy prostitutes, moral reformers, jazzmen (including Louis Armstrong), Mafia enforcers, venal politicians, and an extremely violent axe murderer.

Quotes 

“It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans.”

 

“New Orleans, it was often observed, was the first American metropolis to build an opera house, but the last to build a sewage system.”

 

“New Orleans’ rebellious and free-spirited personality is nothing if not resilient. And so the disruptive energies of the place- its vibrancy and eccentricity, its defiance and nonconformity, and yes, its violence and depravity- are likely to live on.”

 

“So much, it would seem, for the music that would eventually be regarded as the first truly American art form.”

 

My Take

I liked, but did not love, Empire of Sin.  There just wasn’t enough of a compelling story or characters to really pull me in.   Which shouldn’t be too big of a problem when New Orleans is your source material.  I read this book in anticipation of my first trip to NOLA.  I loved the Crescent City and wished I would have had a better book to get me ready for the visit.

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