Financial Book Club

The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History by Vanessa S. Williamson

Americans have always fought over the meaning of freedom and equality. What is not commonly recognized is that the battles most pivotal in defining our democracy, from the framing of the Constitution to the decades-long backlash to the civil rights movement, hinged on one issue—taxes.

In The Price of Democracy, Vanessa S. Williamson challenges the myth that Americans are instinctively anti-tax, revealing that fights over taxes have always been proxies for deeper conflicts over who is included in “We the People.” Poorer people have repeatedly built movements that sought to tax all Americans to create a more equal and democratic nation. Wealthy people have responded by constraining the power to tax and stifling democracy through voting restrictions, gerrymandering, and violence. Yet as hard as anti-tax crusaders have fought to create an America that redistributes not from rich to poor, but from non-white people to rich white people, the battle rages on. 

The Price of Democracy uncovers how fights for fiscal fairness have defined American history, delivering a powerful message to the present: that taxes are the public’s most powerful weapon in the fight for a real democracy.

About the Author

Vanessa Williamson is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and at the Tax Policy Center. She studies taxation and democracy in America. Her forthcoming book, “The Price of Democracy,” reveals the revolutionary power of taxation in American history. She is also the author of “Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes,” and, with Harvard professor Theda Skocpol, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Dissent, and Teen Vogue, among other outlets. She has discussed her research on NPR’s “Marketplace”, C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal”, CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS”, CNBC’s “Squawk Box”, and MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” She received her Ph.D. in social policy from Harvard University.

Readings

Nobel Prize in Economics 2025 Press Release, nobelprize.org

Nobel Prize in Economics 2025 Press Release, PDF

Videos

-Ceremony (28 minutes):

Nobel Prize in Economics 2025: Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt win the Grand Award

-Joel Mokyr Interview (1 hour, 21 minutes):

The origins of economic prosperity 

-Philippe Aghion Interview (16 minutes. Starts in the 1:25 minute)

Philippe Aghion: Competition, education, flex-security: The pillars of a successful growth structure

-Peter Howitt Interview (46 minutes total):

Brown Professor Emeritus Peter Howitt wins Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2025

Other International Experts (Suggested)

-Michael Sandel TED-Talk (14:37 minutes) (Full biography and work).

Why we shouldn't trust markets with our civic life

-Carlota Perez Interview (21:57 minutes) (Full biography and work).

Harnessing the technological revolution

Throughout your life, you’ve been slowly indoctrinated to believe that money is the only type of wealth. In reality, your wealthy life may involve money, but in the end, it will be defined by everything else.

After three years of research, personal experimentation, and thousands of interviews across the globe, Sahil Bloom has created a groundbreaking blueprint to build your life around five types of wealth: Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth. A life of true fulfillment engages all five types—working dynamically, in concert across the seasons of your journey.

Through powerful storytelling, science-backed practices, and actionable insights, in The 5 Types of Wealth, you’ll learn:

How to prioritize energy-creating tasks to unlock more time in your day
How to create deeper bonds and build a powerful network
• How to engage your purpose to spark continuous growth
• How to maximize health and vitality through three simple principles
• How to achieve financial independence and define your version of “enough”

No matter where you are on your path—a recent graduate, new parent, midlife warrior, retiree, or anything in between—The 5 Types of Wealth will help you act on your priorities to create an instant positive impact in your daily life, make better decisions, and design the life you’ve always dreamed of.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

Money―investing, personal finance, and business decisions―is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.

In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the different ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

In this documentary, hopes soar when a Chinese company reopens a shuttered factory in Ohio. But a culture clash threatens to shatter an American dream.

The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff.

For this meeting, we will discuss one article and three videos.

• AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let’s Make Sure It Benefits Humanity by Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund. January 14, 2024.
• The Economic Possibilities For My Grandchildren from IMF Managing Director’s Keynote Speech at King’s College, Cambridge, followed by a conversation with provost, Gillian Tett, featuring Kristalina Georgieva. March 14, 2024.
• A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow by Kate Raworth with TED. April, 2018

• How do we create a better economy?  by TED-Ed. November, 2022.

This month we will be reading a fiction book!

Brooke Orr is on a mission to change her life and the world. Assisting an octogenarian billionaire in the quest to give away his vast fortune turns out to be deeply satisfying work, a noble life path. All you need to make the world a better place, it turns out, is the right ideals with the right amount of money. She and her billionaire make an uncommon pair: Brooke, 33, is a Black woman raised by a single mother in New York City; Asher Jaffee, 83, is a white business tycoon with an elaborate lifestyle. Each is exhilarated by the new friendship. Asher loves Brooke's willingness to spar with him, and Brooke finds her proximity to Asher's power intoxicating, even mind altering. As limits are increasingly pushed and unusual boundaries crossed, the line between need and want blurs dramatically.

An elder justice expert uncovers the failures in the systems that are supposed to protect us as we age, and provides a battle plan for families and policy-makers to counter the greed and incompetence. Between 1900 and 2000, Americans gained, on average, thirty years of life. That dazzling feat allowed tens of millions of Americans to reach the once-rare age of 85, now the fastest-growing age group. The bad news: For millions of Americans, the Golden Years are appallingly tarnished, leaving them and those who love them at a loss for what to do. More than 34 million family members care for an older relative for "free," but with costs to them in time, money, jobs, and health. Countless seniors are targeted by scammers and make riskier decisions about care, housing, money, and driving due to cognitive decline. And epidemics of isolation and loneliness make older people unnecessarily vulnerable to all sorts of harm. These problems touch millions of families regardless of class, race or gender. Today, one in ten older Americans is neglected or exploited with devastating results. And the systems supposed to safeguard them--like nursing homes, guardianship, Adult Protective Services, and criminal prosecution--often make problems worse. Weaving first- person accounts, her own unrivaled experience, and shocking investigative reporting across the worlds of medicine, law, finance, social services, caregiving, and policy, MT Connolly exposes a reality that has been long hidden--and sometimes actively covered up. But things are not hopeless. Along with diagnosing the ailments, she gives readers better tools to navigate the many challenges of aging--whether adult children caring for aging parents, policy-makers trying to do the right thing, or, should we be so lucky to live to old age, all of us.

Glauber Contessoto gambles his life savings on a joke cryptocurrency. Two months later, he becomes “The Dogecoin Millionaire” and an internet legend. While it might seem easy to get rich online, it’s even easier to lose it all.

Available on Kanopy.