The Expendables: How the Middle Class Got Screwed By Globalization offers a provocative and far-reaching analysis of the economic forces that have marginalized the middle class in the developed world. Jeff Rubin, former CIBC World Markets Chief Economist, presents a compelling case that the decline of the middle class was not only predictable but is a direct consequence of policy choices that favored globalization.

Through a detailed exploration of trends such as stagnant wages in North America since the 1970s, the collapse of union membership, and the shift away from full-time employment, Rubin illustrates the retreat of the middle class. He highlights how agreements like NAFTA and global economic policies such as deregulation and tax legislation that favor the wealthy have contributed to this erosion.

Rubin's argument is not only economic but also touches on the political backlash seen in events like Brexit, the rise of Donald Trump, and the growth of populism in Europe. He suggests that resolving these issues will require rethinking the fundamental ideas about capital and labor that have shaped the current system.

The Expendables is a critical examination of the developed world's economic landscape, offering insights that are both humane and rigorous, and calling for a more equitable future.

In Reclaiming the Discarded, Kathleen M. Millar offers an evocative ethnography of Jardim Gramacho, a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where roughly two thousand self-employed workers known as catadores collect recyclable materials. While the figure of the scavenger sifting through garbage seems iconic of wageless life today, Millar shows how the work of reclaiming recyclables is more than a survival strategy or an informal labor practice.

Rather, the stories of catadores show how this work is inseparable from conceptions of the good life and from human struggles to realize these visions within precarious conditions of urban poverty. By approaching the work of catadores as highly generative, Millar calls into question the category of informality, common conceptions of garbage, and the continued normativity of wage labor. In so doing, she illuminates how waste lies at the heart of relations of inequality and projects of social transformation.

Insightful, surprising, and with ground-breaking revelations about our society, Everybody Lies exposes the secrets embedded in our internet searches, with a foreword by bestselling author Steven Pinker. While people often lie to friends, lovers, doctors, pollsters—and to themselves—in Internet searches, they confess their truths, revealing secrets about sexless marriages, mental health problems, and even racist views.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an economist and former Google data scientist, presents what might be the most important dataset ever collected. This unprecedented database of secrets offers astonishing insights into humankind. For example, anxiety does not increase after a terrorist attack, crime levels drop when a violent film is released, and racist searches are no higher in Republican areas than in Democrat ones.

Stephens-Davidowitz reveals information that can be used to change our culture and addresses the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our well-being—both emotional and physical. Everybody Lies is insightful, funny, and always surprising, exposing the biases and secrets deeply embedded within us, at a time when things are harder to predict than ever.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott, is an essential work that delves into the reasons behind the failure of states to execute large-scale social planning successfully. It presents an analysis of various disasters, from Russia to Tanzania, probing why such efforts often result in calamity.

The book argues that disasters occur when states impose oversimplified visions on complex realities that they cannot fully comprehend. Scott emphasizes the importance of recognizing local, practical knowledge alongside formal, systematic knowledge. He critiques 'development theory' and state planning that ignores the values and wishes of the people it affects. This persuasive narrative identifies four conditions common to all planning disasters: the state's administrative ordering of nature and society; a 'high-modernist ideology' that overestimates the role of science in improving human life; the use of authoritarian power to implement broad interventions; and the inability of a weakened civil society to resist such plans.

Written with clarity, Seeing Like a State brings to light the intricate nature of the world we inhabit and serves as a cautionary tale about the limits of grand societal engineering.