What Would You Put on the Occupy Wall Street Reading List? #owsreadinglist

Lindsay Beyerstein October 9, 2011

The protesters at Zuccotti Park have set up a library of donated books to educate and entertain the activists as they occupy Wall Street.

What would you put on the #owsreadinglist, and why?

Here are a few of my suggestions:

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker, because it has such a clear description of how and why the top 1 percent broke away from the other 99 percent of Americans over the last 30 years.
Debt: The First 5000 Years by anthropologist David Graeber for its fascinating analysis of how debt has become synonymous with moral obligation and how a sloppily-drawn equivalence between the two distorts ethics, politics, and economics.
Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. The central theme of Occupy movement is more equality, even the New York Times is starting to get the picture. While we’re on the subject of equality, here’s a book that explains why more equal societies are healthier, stronger, and more stable.

Submit your own in comments, or tweet them with the hashtag #owsreadinglist

I’ll do a roundup of your answers later in the week.

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Lindsay Beyerstein is an award-winning investigative journalist and In These Times staff writer who writes the blog Duly Noted. Her stories have appeared in Newsweek, Salon, Slate, The Nation, Ms. Magazine, and other publications. Her photographs have been published in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times’ City Room. She also blogs at The Hillman Blog (http://www.hillmanfoundation.org/hillmanblog), a publication of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, a non-profit that honors journalism in the public interest.