Broke and Angry in America
A Story of Inequality, Rage & the American Dream
By Shiva Maharaj, Nick Polson & Vadim Sokolov
Something is being taken from you. You can feel it in the rent check, the app commission, the mortgage rejection, the student loan payment. You just can’t name it.
This book names it.
The Numbers Are Not Subtle
27.1%
Gen Z homeownership rate — vs. 40.5% for Boomers at the same age.
$13,900
Median Gen Z net worth — vs. Boomers’ $288,700.
400%
Home prices since 1990 — while household income rose only 200%.
One Mechanism. Three Domains. Two Centuries.
A single economic idea — rent extraction — explains why an entire generation is locked out.
David Ricardo described it in 1817. Henry George diagnosed it in 1879. America chose not to fix it. In 2026, the same mechanism operates across three domains:
Housing
Landlords capture location premiums created by communities, infrastructure, and population growth. The landlord contributes nothing. Geography did the work.
Platforms
Uber, gig apps, and digital marketplaces collect commissions as modern toll roads. The platform creates the chokepoint, not the demand.
Credentials
Universities gatekeep labor market access. Tuition is rent. The student loan is a mortgage on a position you cannot sell.
What’s Inside
1. Two Dead Economists and the Invisible Landlord On October 29, 1897, an economist died in a Manhattan hotel room, four days before an election he was expected to win.
2. The Generation That Arrived Late In 1975, a 25-year-old with a high school diploma and a factory job could buy a house.
3. J.K. Rowling: What It Feels Like to Be Poor Before she was J.K. Rowling she was JK — a single mother on Income Support.
4. Platform Feudalism In feudal England, the lord owned the land. The peasant worked it. The lord collected the rent.
5. The Coffee Shop Economy In March 2020, American office workers went home. Five years later, many never came back.
6. The Body Tax A number on an envelope. Maya, the Austin developer from Chapter 1, opens her health insurance renewal.
7. The Phenomenology of Broke The previous chapters traced the mechanisms of extraction — through housing, platforms, and credentials.
8. The Psychology of Rage The previous two chapters traced what it feels like to be poor — the texture of shame, and how it converts to anger.
9. Two Different Cages The last chapter established the mechanics: anger requires a judgment of blame.
10. The Fix Nine chapters ago, we named the problem: scarce, unproduced positions capture value.
11. Epilogue: The Original Argument Henry George published Progress and Poverty in 1879. It became one of the best-selling books in America.
“The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land.”
— Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879)