"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn wasn’t a new book when my mother was young. It’s still luminous, the story of Francie Nolan struggling up in a tenement slum through the cracks in the pavement to reach the sun. It may be the best book I’ve ever read about poverty, parenthood, the immigrant experience, and just about everything else. My firstborn daughter is named Francie Nolan."

This books lays out a simple, brilliant and practical way of eliminating the current and painful polarization of wealth and poverty. It proves with practical examples that low-income families will save money for higher education and home-ownership if they have the opportunity. All it takes is the investment of a few thousand dollars in each low-income family. This is far more practical and less condescending than any guaranteed annual income scheme.

"What else comes to my mind? Bicycle Thieves was always one I loved, too. Again, deeply moving, operatic Italian story. Impossible to see the film and not weep. The simple life of people just trying to get through the day in very hard times. High unemployment after the second world war — a bicycle is the ticket out of unemployment and poverty. That’s a film that also still works. I see it every couple years. I look at that again."

"An autobiography of Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, a remarkable polymath who more people should know about. In an age of increasing specialization, he’s a rare generalist — applying what he learned as a scientist to other aspects of his life. Crossing disciplines, he was at the intersection of “information sciences.” He won the Nobel for his theory of “bounded rationality,” and is perhaps best known for his insightful quote “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”"