About Me
I’m an advocate for responsible business and an expert on consumer and commercial finance.
My most recent work has been partnering with institutional investors to raise the bar for corporate conduct on issues like ethical AI, labor rights and tenant rights. I’m currently earning a J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center.
Some of my publications are below.
Books and Chapters
Delinquent: Inside America’s Debt Machine: University of California Press, 2022.
For the last half-century, Americans from the left and the right have mostly agreed on one thing: access to credit is a good thing, and government should try to protect (and expand) credit access. But as of 2019, American families spend an average of $1,023 per year on credit card interest and fees alone. Delinquent: Inside America’s Debt Machine asks the question: “When is access to credit a good thing — something to protect and promote — and when does debt set American families back?
Delinquent was longlisted for the 2022 Porchlight Best Business Book of the Year. From Porchlight Books: Even if you think “you know everything about the root causes of income inequality and how it might be addressed, I urge you to pick up Elena Botella’s Delinquent. It is an unexpected eye-opener and page-turner.”
“You Are Not Expected to Understand This:” How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World: Princeton University Press, 2022.
I’m one of 30 contributors to “You Are Not Expected to Understand This,” a story of technology and society, told through twenty six of the most important lines of computer code ever written.
“In truth, ‘You Are Not Expected to Understand This’ is startlingly understandable! These vivid, lucid, brilliant essays tell the origin stories of coding, the secret infrastructure that shapes our online life. We meet the people who wrote and rewrote the lines of code that changed the world. We glimpse their ambitions, mistakes, remorse, fixes, and ingenuity. We understand why (and how) women were the ones who designed early programming languages like COBOL; how pop-up ads came to exist; how the ‘like’ button blew up news and politics as we knew them. Read this book, and you will never look at your newsfeed the same way again.”—Liza Mundy, author of Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
Articles
My work on business, finance, technology and economic policy has been published in Slate, Business Insider, American Banker, Vice, The Nation, and more.
The financial sector:
- Wyoming Wants to Be the Crypto Capital of the U.S. – reported commentary for Slate, June 2021. You can hear me discussing this article on The Majority Report with Sam Seder, which first aired on Peacock.
- Investment Firms Aren’t Buying All the Houses. But They Are Buying the Most Important Ones. – reported commentary for Slate, June 2021.
- Can a Pagan Credit Union break the spell of big banking? – reported feature in The Outline, September 2019
- A Judge Said a Lending Tycoon Didn’t Know He Was Breaking the Law. Should That Matter? – reported commentary for Slate, October 2019
- Why Credit Card Debt Is At An All-Time High, While Unemployment Is At A 50-Year Low – explainer/data journalism for Forbes.com, February 2020
- What To Salvage From the Wreckage of Libra – reported commentary for Slate, December 2019
- Under New Rules, Banks Will No Longer Earn Civil Rights “Brownie Points” For Pushing Families Into Credit Card Debt – reported commentary, Forbes.com, May 2020
- Banks should measure their social impact – op-ed in American Banker, October 2018
- Why We Shouldn’t Want Banks to Go All In on Artificial Intelligence – op-ed for Slate, October 2019
- Three countries America can learn from when it comes to protecting consumers – commentary in The FinReg Blog, a project of the Duke Law Global Financial Markets Center, September 2018
Economic policy:
- The American Disaster Relief System is Broken – reported feature in Vice, April 2020
- Why New Jersey’s Unemployment Insurance System Uses a 60-Year-Old Programming Language – reported commentary in Slate, April 2020
- A 20 cent raise can cause Iowans to lose thousands of dollars in child care support – reported feature in TalkPoverty, a publication of the Center for American Progress, June 2019
- What Seniors Need To Know About Trump’s 2021 Federal Budget – reported analysis for Forbes.com, February 2020
- Proposed Changes To Social Security Disability Insurance Could Undermine Your Retirement Security, Even If You’re Not Currently Disabled – reported analysis for Forbes.com, February 2020
Economic mobility, poverty, & opportunity:
- The secret anxiety of the upwardly mobile – reported feature in The Outline, October 2018
- A Professor of Ethics Weighs In on the Challenges of Being a Low-Income Student – Q&A in The Nation, October 2019
- Who Saved the American City? And Who Almost Destroyed It? – book review in Slate, November 2019