● What to Do with Your Money When Crisis Hits: A Survival Guide
Michelle Singletary
Adaptation via The Washington Post
Increasingly, even workers with full-time salaried jobs are relying on side hustles. Nearly 1 in 4 Americans earn money from the digital-platform economy, according to the Pew Research Center. You might rent your home or apartment through Airbnb. You might be a freelance writer or contract employee.
Where once a side hustle was what someone did while between steady 9-to-5 jobs, many people have now decided that the gig economy is the way they want to work. Or because of a job loss, it’s the only work they can get. But the hard reality is, whether out of desire or necessity, it’s important to figure out whether you can live well enough on income earned in the gig economy.

● Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems
Alan Rubel, et al.
Summary via publisher (Cambridge University Press)
Algorithms influence every facet of modern life: criminal justice, education, housing, entertainment, elections, social media, news feeds, work… the list goes on. Delegating important decisions to machines, however, gives rise to deep moral concerns about responsibility, transparency, freedom, fairness, and democracy. Algorithms and Autonomy connects these concerns to the core human value of autonomy in the contexts of algorithmic teacher evaluation, risk assessment in criminal sentencing, predictive policing, background checks, news feeds, ride-sharing platforms, social media, and election interference. Using these case studies, the authors provide a better understanding of machine fairness and algorithmic transparency. They explain why interventions in algorithmic systems are necessary to ensure that algorithms are not used to control citizens’ participation in politics and undercut democracy.

● Baby Boomer Investing in the Perilous Decade of the 2020s: How to Live a Dignified Retirement
Ronald Surz
Summary via Amazon
Most of our 78 million baby boomers will spend much of this decade in the Risk Zone spanning the 10 years before and after retirement. Losses in the Risk Zone can make remaining lifetimes far less comfortable, and could make boomers a burden on society because $50 trillion is at stake.Following the Roaring 2010s, the odds of avoiding a market crash in this decade are incredibly low. This book explains why inflation and other threats are likely to burst bubbles in stock and bond markets, creating significant investment losses.

● Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
Lucas Bessire
Summary via publisher (Princeton University Press)
The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.

● The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past
Mike Savage
Summary via publisher (Harvard University Press)
The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies.

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