Evicted, by Mathew Desmond, is an amazing work of ethnographic research into the lives of the urban poor and in particular their experiences with housing. Most importantly to me it feels real: nothing is sugarcoated. The poor people are incredibly irresponsible, but also the landlords are greedy, and the government agencies are incompetent and counterproductive. One typical event sequence goes something like this: a tenant living in a decrepit unit calls the building inspector to report some egregious violation. The inspector arrives and promptly demands that the landlord make a list of expensive repairs. The landlord retaliates by evicting the tenant because of her heroin habit.
The Origins of Political Order, by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama seems to have a bit of a bad reputation in Lesswrong, but I found it to be quite unjustified. I have quite a lot of background knowledge in history and the first third or so of the book was just crammed with revelations it had taken me years of reading to realize. I think it’s very important to realize that modern, western institutions are not in any sense the default, dependent on certain cultural attitudes, and exactly how various countries managed to not develop them that might have.
Nonfiction Books Thread
Evicted, by Mathew Desmond, is an amazing work of ethnographic research into the lives of the urban poor and in particular their experiences with housing. Most importantly to me it feels real: nothing is sugarcoated. The poor people are incredibly irresponsible, but also the landlords are greedy, and the government agencies are incompetent and counterproductive. One typical event sequence goes something like this: a tenant living in a decrepit unit calls the building inspector to report some egregious violation. The inspector arrives and promptly demands that the landlord make a list of expensive repairs. The landlord retaliates by evicting the tenant because of her heroin habit.
The Origins of Political Order, by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama seems to have a bit of a bad reputation in Lesswrong, but I found it to be quite unjustified. I have quite a lot of background knowledge in history and the first third or so of the book was just crammed with revelations it had taken me years of reading to realize. I think it’s very important to realize that modern, western institutions are not in any sense the default, dependent on certain cultural attitudes, and exactly how various countries managed to not develop them that might have.