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Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
Sudhir Venkatesh · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorPlanet of Slums
Mike Davis · 256 pages
Mike Davis charts the expected global urbanization explosion over the next 30 years and points out that outside China most of the rest of the world's urban growth will be without industrialization or development, rather a 'peverse' urban boom in spite of stagnant or negative urban economic growth.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo · 256 pages
The dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities. In this fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human. Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich · 248 pages
"Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed." "Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right - gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes - yet have become repeatedly vulnerable t
The Condition of the Working Class in England
Friedrich Engels · 336 pages
"The Condition of the Working Class is the best-known work of Engels, and in many ways still the best study of the working class in Victorian England. It was also Engels's first book, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Manchester was then at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution and Engels compiled his study from his own observations and detailed contemporary reports. T
The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City
Jennifer Toth · 267 pages
Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels that form the bowels of New York City. This book is about them, the so-called "mole people" living alone and in communities, in the frescoed waiting rooms of long-forgotten subway tunnels and in pick-axed compartments below busway platforms. It is about how and why people move undergraound, who they are, and what they have to say
Sidewalk
Mitchell Duneier · 383 pages
"In Sidewalk, Mitchell Duneier takes us back to the streets of the Village, but finds a scene very different from the one Jacobs described. Much of the architecture remains, and many people live the way Jacobs suggested, but there is another population in the Village today - poor black men who make their livelihoods on the sidewalks by selling secondhand goods, panhandling, and scavenging books a
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
Noam Scheiber · 384 pages
The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone
Richard G. Wilkinson, Kate E. Pickett · 400 pages
Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Australians? The answer in each case: inequality. This groundbreaking book, based on years of research, provides hard evidence to show: How almost everything - from life expectancy to mental illness, violence to illiteracy
Material World: A Global Family Portrait
Peter Menzel, Charles C. Mann · 255 pages
Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World
Doug Saunders · 368 pages
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
Cathy O'Neil · 272 pages
A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life — and threaten to rip apart our social fabric We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should l
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier
Edward L. Glaeser · 404 pages
**A pioneering urban economist offers fascinating, even inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest invention and our best hope for the future.** America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the 3 percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly... Or are they? As
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond · 592 pages
"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, G
World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
Immanuel Wallerstein · 109 pages
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Hans Rosling · 342 pages
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir · 304 pages
An examination of how scarcity--and our flawed responses to it--shapes our lives, our society, and our culture.
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels · 56 pages
"The Communist Manifesto," penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is a revolutionary treatise advocating for the overthrow of capitalist systems and the establishment of a classless society. Published in 1848, its succinct yet powerful prose remains a cornerstone of socialist ideology, inspiring movements worldwide.
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
Seth Holmes · 264 pages
"Based on five years of research in the field (including berry-picking and traveling with migrants back and forth from Oaxaca up the West Coast), Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, uncovers how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care."--
No Logo
Naomi Klein · 512 pages
"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Paul Collier · 209 pages
"In this elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty, economist Paul Collier writes persuasively that although nearly five billion of the world's people are beginning to climb from desperate poverty and to benefit from globalization's reach to developing countries, there is a "bottom billion" of the world's poor whose countries, largely immune to
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo · 320 pages
"Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world's poor. But much of the work they do is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, flat out harmful misperceptions at worst. Banerjee and Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, super
Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day
Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, Orlanda Ruthven · 283 pages
The authors report on the yearlong "financial diaries" of villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money. --from publisher description.
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes · 621 pages
"When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When people are assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the celebrated parched lands of Northeast Brazil, Death Without Weeping is a luminously written, "womanly hearted" account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness, and death that centers on the lives of the women and children of a