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Latest Read: Stealing Fire

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler. Steven is an author and entrepreneur and I previously read his book The Future Is Faster Than You Think. He is addressing flow, yet like my previous read, he somewhat misses the mark.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler

There is certainly some promise to the idea of “flow” the ability to drive performance. Steven is focusing on ecstatic: the “overwhelming happiness or joy” throughout the book. In addition, this contributes to his launch of the flow genome project.

However, for many readers the thought they can transfer their existing life into the high performance of Navy SEALS, Google programmers, and even at the extreme end, become an out of work Venezuelan suddenly bursting out to be an internet video “star” is even beyond perplexing.

In fact, the idea that any reader lacking the required years and years of dedication, education, and physical training to be a SEAL, a complete and through understanding of advanced computer programming — including the ability to navigate through Google’s notorious interviewing process is pretty far fetched. Yet, add on top of all of this the “luck of the draw” to become a 2011 internet video sensation? Yes, this alludes to the skillsets required to be able to ‘steal fire’ as the book seems to suggest. Yet, this is a metrics data mining issue. And it would not seem possible….unless you add drugs to the mix.

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Education Milwaukee Reading

Latest Read: Race for Profit

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Dr. Taylor is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Her 2013 PhD dissertation in African-American Studies from Northwestern is titled Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis in the 1970s which moreover serves as the core of this book.

As a result of reading Evicted by Matthew Desmond, Keeanga’s book offers very powerful insights to housing in society from the Housing and Urban Development Act (HUD) of 1968 under the Johnson Administration to the 1974 Ford Administration Housing and Community Development Act which created uneven block grants and shared revenue with federal oversight to social welfare.

However, in contrast to Evicted, Race for Profit reveals deep, historical racism within the housing market that continues today and certainly accelerated under COVID. These forces obviously created downstream impacts at state and local levels, along with private financial firms including banks and real estate.

Keeanga in fact documents those failings were simply accelerating via “public/private partnerships” by Real Estate and Banking firms. This provided another opportunity to fleece poor African American women.

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Education Globalization Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: How Markets Fail

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy. John is a staff writer at The New Yorker and teaches at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. This book was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

John has certainly written a very well structured book on economic markets divided into three parts: Utopian Economics, Reality-Based Economics, and The Great Crunch. This provides necessary insights to the very long history of economics. In addition, John shows how they have repeatedly failed from the 1700s to the the 2008 economic crisis.

I certainly enjoyed John sharing multiple points of historic economic failures via the insights of all economic experts at the time.

Utopian Economics

John places part one into a Utopian view. He reveals how attempts to link the macro and micro divisions of the economic model result in errors. At the same time it may not really apply across today’s COVID, gig economy.

Repeatedly the economic experts in the 1800s were very wrong. This view really cannot translate today across the globalized world. He also views the economic crisis of 2008 as a drastic market failure. The development and repair were excluded by the systems of the dominant economic paradigm of the past three decades.” John certainly illustrates how utopians believed in the infallible invisible hand of the market via Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill.

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Education Milwaukee Reading

Latest Read: Evicted

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. Matthew is a sociologist at Princeton University. He is also the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Evicted was the 2017 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, In addition, Time Magazine named Evicted one of the ten best nonfiction books of the decade.

Matthew follows eight families across greater Milwaukee who indeed are struggling to live in apartments. For many readers, Evicted should dramatically change our country’s limited understanding of real poverty, impacting both Caucasian and African American families. One can only imagine the acceleration of evictions since COVID derailed the economy.

It is certainly remarkable to be living in Milwaukee and being able to see the apartments around the greater Milwaukee area in person on trips. Some small cities outside Milwaukee including Cudahy are also written into family stories.

Furthermore, Matthew documents that a common notion is that rent should equate to 30 percent of income. However multiple stories of families reveal they are spending up to 80 percent of income on rent. This certainly leaves so many with almost no money for food, clothing, or basic amenities.

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Education Reading

Latest Read: Unraveling Bias

Unraveling Bias: How Prejudice Has Shaped Children for Generations and Why It’s Time to Break the Cycle by Christia Spears, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Kentucky. In addition, her work on the impact of gender stereotypes on children and adolescents has been published widely including a blogging post for Psychology Today called Beyond Pink and Blue.

Unraveling Bias: How Prejudice Has Shaped Children for Generations and Why It’s Time to Break the Cycle

Christia provides insights to the ‘how and why’ biases are developed and specifically at what age levels deeper, rigid perceptions are established. Of course, it is important to understand how this exposure to bias will impact diversity.

One of the impactful areas for childhood development involves how children internalize non-verbal cues. At this junction, the non-verbal cues will reveal bias even when a conversation regarding a type of bias is not communicated.

In addition, these children ultimately see adults around them (family, a parent’s co-worker, or adult social relationships) and learn how to react.

In addition, perhaps to no surprise, Unraveling Bias reveals how children impacted by bias, specially discrimination will score lower on tests and have higher dropout rates.

Students also battle depression, low self esteem, higher drug use, and even higher thoughts of suicide. This will certainly increase additional health issues as they grow up.

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