Everybody here should read the book that this article is reviewing: Evicted by Matthew Desmond. It's an incredible accomplishment in sociology and one of the most insightful works on poverty I have ever encountered.

Two of the books he mentions won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction: "Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS" and "Evicted".

They are both excellent.

Evicted is incredible. Totally worth reading if you haven't lived in crushing poverty in America.

Didn't care for Sapiens. Very pop-science with the author's opinion littered throughout alongside wild predictions on AI, automation.

The only other book I read this year was Evicted by Matthew Desmond. It was an excellent account of poverty cycles as it relates to housing.

If it helps, Evicted recently won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction. Great book.

I just read the book Evicted by Matthew Desmond which goes into great detail about how much money there is to be made from this approach.

It's definitely sympathetic to the plight of the very low income tenants but not unjustly so; anyway I found it fascinating and worth recommending here:

https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/...

Favorites that I read in 2018:

* Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep)

* Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4806.Longitude)

* Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156469-never-split-the...)

* Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25852784-evicted)

* Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11084145-steve-jobs)

PSA: if you use an e-reader or like audiobooks, check out Libby: https://meet.libbyapp.com/

I'm not affiliated with them. Nice app for borrowing ebooks and audiobooks from your local library.

Time. Yes that's important as well. It's not just cooking.

Time is lost waiting for the bus, because you can't afford a car. You wait in line at the store because it can't afford another cashier and better technology. Etc.

People think poverty is their well to do life but with less money. Oh God, that's so ignorant.

BTW, the book Evicted is an eye and heart opener. Highly recommended.

Leisure Stuff:

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga Of Oklahoma City, It's Chaotic Founding... by Sam Anderson

Midnight In Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham

Dune by Frank Herbert

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (tried it this year and stopped, want to give it another go)

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang (just finished Exhalation and I think it's great)

An Ursula K. Le Guin novel, have not picked one out yet

A book related to basketball (possibly Dream Team, but IDK yet)

Less Leisure Stuff:

Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform by John Pfaff

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

The End Of Policing by Alex S Vitale

Either Manufacturing Consent or Understanding Power by Chomsky

The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold

Work:

Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws by Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto

Finish Writing An Interpreter In Go by Thorsten Ball

If I can get through all of these, I will be very pleased. Throw in a book or two at recommendation from friends and I think I'm full for the year.

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 Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui. This gorgeous graphic novel is a deeply personal memoir that explores what it means to be a parent and a refugee. The author’s family fled Vietnam in 1978. After giving birth to her own child, she decides to learn more about her parents’ experiences growing up in a country torn apart by foreign occupiers.

>Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. If you want a good understanding of how the issues that cause poverty are intertwined, you should read this book about the eviction crisis in Milwaukee. Desmond has written a brilliant portrait of Americans living in poverty. He gave me a better sense of what it is like to be poor in this country than anything else I have read.

>Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, by Eddie Izzard. Izzard’s personal story is fascinating: he survived a difficult childhood and worked relentlessly to overcome his lack of natural talent and become an international star. If you’re a huge fan of him like I am, you’ll love this book. His written voice is very similar to his stage voice, and I found myself laughing out loud several times while reading it.

>The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Most of the books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen about the Vietnam War focused on the American perspective. Nguyen’s award-winning novel offers much-needed insight into what it was like to be Vietnamese and caught between both sides. Despite how dark it is, The Sympathizer is a gripping story about a double agent and the trouble he gets himself into.

>Energy and Civilization: A History, by Vaclav Smil. Smil is one of my favorite authors, and this is his masterpiece. He lays out how our need for energy has shaped human history—from the era of donkey-powered mills to today’s quest for renewable energy. It’s not the easiest book to read, but at the end you’ll feel smarter and better informed about how energy innovation alters the course of civilizations.

Source: (https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Best-Books-2017)

>The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui.
This gorgeous graphic novel is a deeply personal memoir that explores what it means to be a parent and a refugee. The author’s family fled Vietnam in 1978. After giving birth to her own child, she decides to learn more about her parents’ experiences growing up in a country torn apart by foreign occupiers.

>Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond.
If you want a good understanding of how the issues that cause poverty are intertwined, you should read this book about the eviction crisis in Milwaukee. Desmond has written a brilliant portrait of Americans living in poverty. He gave me a better sense of what it is like to be poor in this country than anything else I have read.

>Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, by Eddie Izzard.
Izzard’s personal story is fascinating: he survived a difficult childhood and worked relentlessly to overcome his lack of natural talent and become an international star. If you’re a huge fan of him like I am, you’ll love this book. His written voice is very similar to his stage voice, and I found myself laughing out loud several times while reading it.

>The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Most of the books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen about the Vietnam War focused on the American perspective. Nguyen’s award-winning novel offers much-needed insight into what it was like to be Vietnamese and caught between both sides. Despite how dark it is, The Sympathizer is a gripping story about a double agent and the trouble he gets himself into.

>Energy and Civilization: A History, by Vaclav Smil.
Smil is one of my favorite authors, and this is his masterpiece. He lays out how our need for energy has shaped human history—from the era of donkey-powered mills to today’s quest for renewable energy. It’s not the easiest book to read, but at the end you’ll feel smarter and better informed about how energy innovation alters the course of civilizations.

Do you know of the book "Evicted" by Matthew Desmond? It was for me both enlightening (in what it revealed) and depressing (in what it revealed).

Yeah, some people make bad decisions. We. All. Do. The difference is, some are more unlucky than others. Life is hard. I'm not sure why we go out of our way to make it hard for others (who need our help).

http://evictedbook.com/

“Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” is fantastic, really. It was by far the most recommended book by guests on my favourite podcast and so I has high expectations, but it exceeded them.

I’d also recommend “Down and Out in Paris and London” by George Orwell. It’s a travel-log where Orwell actually becomes a “tramp” in order to best document the experience of homelessness and to meet people experiencing homelessness. Orwell recognised the basic truth about homelessness almost a century ago, and unfortunately nothing really has changed.

"Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American City", by Matthew Desmond

In Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond, the author shows not only that there is money to be made renting housing to the American lower class, but also that it is in fact more profitable than renting to their more economically well off counterparts.

This is not because they have more money to part with but because they can be squeezed harder.

The wider concept seemed counterintuitive to me at first but I see various implementations abound in the wild the harder I look. This article shows one example.

They also get it on both ends. Felons make 41% less than their same age counterparts [1]. Thus they are both felons, and have lower income (as well as a higher likelihood of evictions, etc).

I've been reading Evictions: Poverty and Profit in the American City on recommendation from HN and it has been eye opening. They don't make 1,000 calls, but there are several stories of people making a little over or under 100 different calls because of prior evictions and/or felony convictions. The quantity is only magnified by the fact that they're limited to apartments that are ~$500/month (which is already ~75+% of their monthly income). The book is heavily anti-landlord, although I'm not versed enough to say whether that's the truth or if there is a heavy bias.

I don't know what the solution is. There's a delicate balance of trying to give people a chance to recover or rehabilitate without also forcing landlords with cheap property to enter into blind negotiations and potentially damaging their own property. Frankly, Section 8 seems like a bad solution, and that we should go back to government owned and leased housing where you won't be evicted for complaining about sub-standard conditions because the landlord knows you can't afford a lawyer.

I would recommend learning more about the things you hate.

I used to hate modern art. I thought it was only for obnoxious people. Then I decided to take a college course on it and it's my favorite period of art because I learned to understand it. For the same reasons, I decided to take a course on the black power movement. My parents were racist so I was probably racist so I wanted to learn more. I learned about the Civil rights movement and discovered many personal heroes. I used to dislike John McCain and politics even though I knew very little about either, until I saw a documentary about McCain and learned he was literally a hero. I used to think finance, statistics, and programming were for smart people unlike me, until I learned more and developed a love for it.

I used to think the red pill was complete trash until someone forced me to watch the red pill documentary. It led to a painful breakup where we both weren't able to empathize with each other's traumas. I could not empathize with his pain of feeling inferior (because that's my status quo) and he could not empathize with the systemic oppression and violence against women (physical, sexual, and emotional). I feel he felt that his father may have been taken advantage of, abused and used financially and feared that for himself. While I watched my father abuse my mother, emotionally and financially, and feared that for myself. It was strange how we both felt strongly about both sides, the same problem, except we were passionately divided simply because of gender. I learned a lot and probably will always be learning from that experience.

Every time I've challenged my views, I've been rewarded.

Two books I've enjoyed or am enjoying that are about chaos:

Evicted by Mathew Desmond covers American poverty from a housing perspective.

The Big Short covers the 2008 financial crisis and it's much more informative than the film.

I think we read the same book. I don’t really think of Middletown as a Rust Belt city. It’s a town of 50,000 people. I am talking about big cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland and smaller ones like Youngstown and Erie.

As someone who lives in one of those cities, it seemed like a clear correlation could have been made. It was chance to unite a rural and an urban problem across race and I thought it was a missed opportunity. I still enjoyed the book, but think it is even more powerful when read in tandem with a book like Evicted [1] that views the problem from another perspective.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/...

I do not know why you insist down this line of thinking when I am talking about _impoverished_ people. If someone is skipping meals to feed their child, what funds are they using for the bus? And what are they going to do when they arrive at some magical "cheaper COL" and they have no job?

I implore you to go volunteer at your local homeless shelter. After talking with several perfectly sane and working homeless individuals you will realize some people really have no money leftover to better their plight. They really are trapped.

If you don't feel like actually meeting people whose life and privilege is drastically different than yours, at least read Matthew Desmond's Evicted to round out your knowledge on the America in which you live.