Message from the Dean

Recommended Reading

Dear incoming students,

Summer has officially begun! The spirit of the Dean’s Summer Reading List is to offer a short, curated list of recommended summer reading that is insightful and not academic (these books are not required in our courses), but can jumpstart conversation about ideas, concepts, and philosophies as you prepare to study here at Pardee RAND. We’ve put together a handful of summer reading books that have a lot of ideas in them — including challenges of the U.S. criminal justice system, the gulfs between right and left as well as between the elite and the working class, the growing role of artificial intelligence in society, and the historical perils of nation building. These books also have much to say about good policy research — what it is and how to do it.

Please read at least two books from our reading list this summer before starting the program. The first, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal, is required for all. The second will be your choice from four options on the list. These books were recommended by our faculty, students, staff, and alumni. In addition to your own conversations, you will be discussing the readings at the fall orientation and in your fall quarter classes.

Happy reading!

Susan L. Marquis
Dean and Distinguished Chair of Policy Analysis
Vice President, Innovation
dean@prgs.edu

Previous Recommendations

• The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie
• Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones
• Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism by Ian Bremmer
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
• I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took on the Fast Food Giants and Won by Susan Marquis
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond
• The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn't What It Used to Be, by Moisés Naím
• Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, by Sarah Glidden
• Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, by Sam Quiones
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, by Michael Lewis
• The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes
• The Fires of Spring: A Post–Arab Spring Journey Through the Turbulent New Middle East — Turkey, Iraq, Qater, Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia, by Shelley Culbertson
• Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, by Robert D. Putnam
• Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues, by Martin J. Blaser
• It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower, by Michela Wrong
• The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster (full text available online)
• Capital in the 21st Century, by Thomas Piketty
• The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, by William Easterly
• Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder
• It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
• The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolutions, by Freeman Dyson
• Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions, by John Hammond, Ralph Keeny, and Howard Raiffa