Adrift: 100 Charts that Reveal Why America is on the Brink of Change

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Over the past few decades, they’ve been as much as two times more likely than adults born in the US to launch a new business. We lack neither wind nor sail, we have no shortage of captains or gear, yet our mighty ship flounders in a sea of partisanship, corruption, and selfishness.

There is at the back a small (tiny) section that touches on where we could go from here, but the steps we need to take have proven daunting since the Reagan administration started unraveling the middle class in 1980.Adrift as a book covers some very interesting observations about America and provides simple charts to back them up. If you want to be part of the middle class, you need to find a way to afford college or vocational training. I loved this book, it was a quick read, but it offered many different ways to view the opportunity we have with our country. China - and is this really the situation we want in the world's two superpowers as they edge closer and closer to confrontation?

Our discourse is coarse, young people are failing to form relationships, and our brightest seek individual glory at the expense of the commonwealth. Any part of his syllabus that touches on how to get a book deal would probably have good information. Involvement in communities like Church, Guides, Rotary, and even talking to people has gone down since the 90’s. Scott Galloway is a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he teaches brand strategy and digital marketing to second-year MBA students. Yet, despite that, there are still glimmers of hope scattered throughout our rapidly changing world.

Jeff Bezos has enough capital to end homelessness in the US, eradicate malaria worldwide and pay 700,000 teachers’ salaries. But it is true that the internet revolution makes most of modern life possible, and we can be glad that access is growing in developing countries where it’s traditionally been out of the question. In 1965, the chiefs of America’s largest 350 companies by revenue made 21 times the average compensation of their industries’ workers. You can just flip through a few pages whenever you've got a minute, and you'll come out the other side feeling a bit smarter. You've got folks like Galloway on one side, painting everything black, and then there's an equal number of doom-mongers on the other side.

For example, when he mentions that we haven't been able to unite like we did in the decades after WWII, he fails to recognize the colonial undertones that came from the Truman Doctrine, etc. The book is a great summary of where the country is today, as compared to the past or to other countries or comparative technologies, or, or, or! Lots of those things are important, and some might even relate to his argument (which, once again, is: institutions creating competition and protecting the middle class from the excesses of unrestricted competition--"ruthless capitalism"--have both atrophied).

Further, its healthcare costs per capita are among the highest in the world yet life expectancy is lower than most other developed nations. It might take a creative approach but don’t sell yourself short by giving up on the idea – even if it comes with major challenges.