Moneybox

The Rent Is Too Damn High Now Available for Preorder

I’m excited to say that my new e-book original for Simon & Schuster, The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It And Why It Matters More Than You Think is available now for pre-order.

You can get it for your Barnes & Noble Nook here or from Apple for your iOS device here or of course from Amazon here. If you don’t own a Nook or a Kindle or an iPhone/iPad then you’ll find that Amazon offers free Kindle reader software for PC and Mac. If you don’t have any kind of computer at all, then you’re out of luck but it’s puzzling that you’re reading this blog. The book is 80 pages long and available for the low low price of $3.99—my personal view is that most public affairs books are just too long and I’m really excited about the opportunity to write something that’s short, sweet, and to the point. I hope people who read it will have questions or raise objections that I can then address on the blog rather than bogging the book down with too much of my effort to guess what elements people may want to hear mroe about it.

The “Why It Matters More Than You Think” issue is really the core of the book. The fact that it’s more expensive to get a house in San Francisco or Boston than in Omaho or Birmingham is one of those things that everyone knows and that shapes decisions and life choices and yet doesn’t get on the national policy radar at all. My basic argument is that in an economy where the majority of people are providing services to other people, that the economics of space and place are relevant again in the kind of way that they were for an agricultural society. But while the 19th Century United States used widely available free (or, you know, stolen) land to become the ultimate opportunity society, 21st Century America is failing to deploy state of the art technologies like the elevator and the bus to create the 21st Century version of economic opportunity.