currently have a few books with markers in them
Coming Apart by Charles Murray
Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective by Thomas Sowell
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche
Parliament of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke
as for camus, I can highly recommend his fiction.
Charles Murray. He doesn't like Those People, I gather.
What are your feelings on the subject?
Murray's book is interesting. He's decrying the growing gap between the lowest class in American society and the elites. According to his argument, since the 1960s, American culture has lost a type of commonality across all income levels that used to exist. Instead, the elite and the rest of us really do have different cultures, values, ways of life. They live in different zip codes and have quite a bubble built around themselves. He says it's unAmerican, that we're losing (or have lost) something that was a defining part of the USA for a long time. Basically, we never were a classless society, but we all had commonalities that tied us together across class. Now, he argues, we don't. The lower class has largely declined in religiosity, marriage, employment, civic engagement, trust in their neighbors, etc. I'm not finished with it yet but he hasn't really given any concrete prescriptions for how to "fix" it and explicitly said his primary aim with the book was just to define the problem, but I assume some token effort will be made as always is in these types of books that identify complex problems (real or imagined) in society.
I probably wouldn't have chosen to read the book on my own (it's for a book club) but it's definitely worth it and within my interests that range through economics and social science, political philosophy, and philosophy in general.
