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Richard Florida's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Richard Florida recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Richard Florida's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
Why political inequality is to blame for economic and social injustice

Political equality is the most basic tenet of democracy. Yet in America and other democratic nations, those with political power have special access to markets and public services. A Republic of Equals traces the massive income inequality observed in the United States and other rich democracies to politicized markets and avoidable gaps in opportunity--and explains why they are the root cause of what ails democracy today.

In this provocative book, economist Jonathan Rothwell draws on the...
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Recommended by Richard Florida, and 1 others.

Richard FloridaMy @CityLab convo with @jtrothwell about his great new book. https://t.co/S9seNI4MZU (Source)

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2
A prizewinning political scientist traces the origins of urban-rural political conflict and shows how geography shapes elections in America and beyond


Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden...
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Recommended by Richard Florida, and 1 others.

Richard Florida@norijabba @Lenny_Mendonca Just seeing this. That core idea is from the brilliant Jonathan Rodden of Stanford political science and his new book Why Cities Lose (Source)

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3
Winner of the Bancroft Prize

In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good.

It wasn't always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great...
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Recommended by Richard Florida, and 1 others.

Richard Florida@JakeAnbinder This is an amazing book. By an incredible historian! (Source)

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4
"In evaluating incentives, everything depends on the details: how much in incentives it takes to truly cause a firm to locate or expand, the multiplier effects, the effects of jobs on employment rates, how jobs affect tax revenue versus public spending needs. Do benefits of incentives exceed costs? This depends on the details. This book is about those details. What magnitudes of incentive effects are plausible? How do benefits and costs vary with incentive designs? What advice can be given to evaluators? What is an ideal incentive policy? Answering these questions about incentives depends on... more
Recommended by Richard Florida, Dani Rodrik, and 2 others.

Richard FloridaEvery single person concerned with economic development or city building must read this book. https://t.co/EeuKXLjK72 (Source)

Dani RodrikA great little book on how to design sensible local business incentives by ⁦@TimBartik⁩. This is a model of good applied economics. https://t.co/9hmQKKMAxe (Source)

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5
The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America

Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of...
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Recommended by Richard Florida, Bilal Zuberi, and 2 others.

Richard Florida@RobAtkinsonITIF @MargRev They do. Interesting thing is nearly all those things when they worked most effectively undergirded local ecosystems like Silicon Valley. O'Mara's new book The Code is masterful on this. National policy can do even more on this front. (Source)

Bilal ZuberiGreat article by ⁦@alexismadrigal⁩. “As O’Mara points out in her book The Code, Lockheed Missiles and Space (later a unit of Lockheed Martin) was the largest Silicon Valley employer from the 1950s into the 1980s.” https://t.co/cH5n3tZCl2 (Source)

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