Good Reads
for your bookshelf
Recent general surveys
of our unequal economic landscape
Class War?
What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality.
Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Americans, our pundits would have us believe, are too busy trying to become rich to worry about living a society where the rich rule. Actual polling data tell a totally different story.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Unjust Deserts:
How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back
Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly (The New Press, 2008)
If you're so smart, the classic put-down goes, why aren't you rich? But our smarts don't make us rich. These two authors know what does.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Super Rich: The Rise of Inequality in Britain and the United States
George Irvin (Polity Press, 2008)
To overcome the global meltdown all around us, this British economist reminds us, we need to go back to the future — back to becoming a society that values greater equality.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Rigging the Game: How Inequality Is Reproduced in Everyday Life.
Michael Schwalbe (Oxford University Press, 2008)
How do social orders that privilege some at the expense of others survive? Why do people accept injustice? A thoughtful sociologist is asking questions even egalitarians all too frequently ignore.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The Confiscation of American Prosperity:
From Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression Michael Perelman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
No two-bit burglars could have possibly pulled this enormous job off. Making America staggeringly unequal took the coordinated effort of an entire corporate elite.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The Squandering of America:
How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity
Robert Kuttner (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
The concentration of wealth at America's economic summit, the veteran progressive economist Robert Kuttner helps us understand, has consequences we disregard at a peril most grave.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class
Robert H. Frank (University of California Press,
2007)
Should average Americans spend any quality time worrying about how rich the rich become? Cornell University economist Bob Frank makes a powerful case for worrying about wealth — and taxing the rich.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The Moral Measure of the Economy
Chuck Collins and Mary Wright.
(Orbis Books, 2007)
Political decisions set the rules that determine how every economy operates. Shouldn't we be asking, asks this insightful new book, what moral values inform those determinations?
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The Color of Wealth : The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide
Meizhu Lui, Bárbara Robles, Betsy Leondar-Wright, Rose Brewer, and Rebecca Adamson, with United for a Fair Economy (The New Press,
2006)
This team effort by veteran activists and academics relates how conscious political decisions — some made years ago, some just yesterday — have denied millions of people of color the opportunity to accumulate assets and live the American dream.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide
in America and Its Poisonous Consequences
Edited by James Lardner and David A. Smith (New
Press, 2005)
Inspired by a 2004 national conference held in New York, this fine
essay collection is brimming with insights about inequality and
our contemporary condition. Contributors dissect the impact of
inequality on everything from housing to happiness.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Economic Apartheid in America:
A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity
Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel (New Press,
2005)
A bit over a decade ago, Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel founded
United for a Fair Economy, today the nation's top activist group
focused on narrowing America's deep gaps in income and wealth.
This new edition of their Economic Apartheid in America,
originally published in 2000, makes a great introductory text for
classrooms and study groups.
REVIEWS
The Wealth Inequality Reader
Edited by Betsy Leondar-Wright, Amy Offner, Adria Scharf,
Meizhu Lui, Amy Gluckman, and Chuck Collins (Dollars &
Sense, 2004)
The 25 essays of this collection zero on America's maldistribution
of wealth, exploring both how the United States became so top-heavy
and what this excess at the top is doing to us.
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming
the Inequality That Limits Our Lives
Sam Pizzigati (The Apex Press, 2004)
America's richest 1 percent now holds more wealth —
over $2 trillion more — than America's entire bottom 90 percent.
Should we care? Greed and Good, a book author Bill Greider
calls “a sweeping tour of life in these United States,” offers a compelling answer. An
American Library Association “outstanding title” of the year (Choice).
The complete Greed and Good text now appears free online.
REVIEWS
Other recent inequality-related titles
Obama's Challenge:
America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency
Robert Kuttner (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008)
This noted progressive economist saw the crash coming. He sees a solution, too — if we're willing to confront concentrated wealth.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Love the Work, Hate the Job
David Kusnet (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2008)
In their rush for jackpots, America's top corporate executives are doing intolerable damage to enterprise well-being. Who says? America's professionals!
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The Big Con:
The True Story of How Washington
Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics
Jonathan Chait (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
The growing inequality of the last three decades rests on a flim-flam economic perspective on how the world works. But that flim-flam, even in an Obama Age, will be no pushover.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
10 Excellent Reasons Not to Hate Taxes.
Edited by Stephanie Greenwood (The New Press, 2007)
A highly readable challenge to the anti-tax ideologues who've helped the rich become profoundly richer — and aggravated life for everyone else.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark
Don Thompson (Aurum, 2008)
Should we be profusely thanking our super-rich for supporting the arts? An economist explores the interaction of fine art and grand fortune.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry
Lawrence Mitchell. (Berrett-Koehler, 2007)
An obsession with short-term profiteering today dominates America's corporate executive suites — and enriches top corporate executives. A leading progressive historian explores why.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
From Civil Rights to Human Rights:
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice
Thomas F. Jackson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)
Martin Luther King, Jr., this new biography engagingly notes, fought for the poor and worried about the rich.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900
Jack Beatty (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
We now live, astute commentators often observe, in a second Gilded Age. Can we learn anything from the first? Jack Beatty rightfully thinks we can.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The Moral Measure of the Economy
Chuck Collins and Mary Wright (Orbis Books, 2007)
Political decisions set the rules that determine how economies operate. Shouldn't we be asking, asks this insightful new book, what moral values inform those determinations?
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The Conscience of a Liberal
Paul Krugman (W. W. Norton & Co., 2007)
Who deserves the blame for America's ever-increasing economic inequality? Paul Krugman's important new book points fingers. But not enough of them.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The United States Since 1980
Dean Baker (Cambridge University Press,
2007)
A leading analyst in Washington progressive think tank circles details the quarter century that saw the United States become the developed world's most colossally unequal nation.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Our American King
David Lozell Martin (Simon & Schuster, 2007)
This remarkable new novel envisions a near and fearsome future that just might scare America straight to a more equitable here and now.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
All Together Now: Common Sense for a
Fair Economy
Jared Bernstein (Berrett-Kohler,
2006)
Why isn't government helping average Americans gain the economic
security they want — and expect — government to provide?
Jared Bernstein, in All Together Now, has the answer.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Rich Britain: The rise and rise of the new super-wealthy
Stewart Lansley ( Politico's,
2006)
Advocates for social justice, this exploration into Anglo-American inequality suggests, need to recognize that decency demands more than “a minimum living standard below which it would be socially unacceptable for people to have to live.” Decency may well also demand a “ceiling at the top.”
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The Impact of Inequality: how to make sick societies healthier
Richard G. Wilkinson (New Press, New York, and Routledge, London, 2005)
The single most cogent work on how great divides in income and wealth undermine the quality — and even the length — of the lives we lead.
Contents and more
A Short History of Progress
Ronald Wright (Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2005)
Archaeologist and historical philosopher Ronald Wright completed
this important new work well before Hurricane Katrina's winds started
roaring. But his new work eerily anticipates Katrina. Environmental
degradation, urban collapse, and deep-seated inequality, Wright
helps us understand, have been going together hand in hand for
4,000 years.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
You Call This a Democracy? Who Pays, Who Benefits
and Who Really Decides
Paul Kivel (The Apex Press, 2006)
A look at how ruling elites in the United States dominate our lives
and institutions. This newly revised second edition includes a
foreword from Jim Hightower and a study guide that makes this work
a useful resource for activists and educators.
Contents
and more
The Great American Jobs Scam:
Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation
Greg LeRoy (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005)
America's corporations are now collecting over $50 billion a year
in tax breaks, outright grants, and other subsidies from America's
taxpayers. These billions, corporate flacks claim, give private
companies the “economic development”
incenitives they need to create badly needed jobs. These billions,
author Greg LeRoy counters, amount to “pure and simple transfers
of wealth to corporate shareholders — from the rest of us.”
TOO MUCH REVIEW
America Beyond Capitalism:
Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy
Gar Alperovitz (John Wiley & Sons, 2005)
Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton White House steadfastly refused
to acknowledge, as a problem, America's continuing concentration
of wealth and power. Those these days who cheer the Clinton years
are, by and large, continuing that indifference. But some voices
are singing a different tune — and speaking directly to what
long-time activist scholar Gar Alperovitz calls America's “real
hunger for new thinking.”
That new thinking takes front and center in Alperovitz's important
new book.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Why Inequality Matters
Ben Jackson and Paul Segal (Catalyst, 2004)
In the UK, a serious challenge is now emerging to the conventional
wisdom that we moderns need not worry about whatever wealth may
be concentrating at the top of our societies. Two researchers at
the Catalyst, a London-based think tank, have just authored an
important new work that sums up the case for paying attention when
the rich become too rich.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The Hidden Cost of Being African American:
How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality
Thomas M. Shapiro (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Racial inequality in the United States, the latest studies make
clear, is actually widening. How can racial inequality be increasing
now that we have knocked down, after years of civil rights struggle,
so many of the barriers that have blocked minority access to jobs,
skills, and education? Brandeis sociologist Thomas Shapiro supplies
a cogent explanation.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
How Australia Compares
Rodney Tiffen and Ross Gittins
(Cambridge University Press, 2004)
What's the best place in the world to live? Authors Tiffen and
Gittins have rated their native land, Australia, against its peer
nations — the 17 other stable democracies of the developed
world — on over 200 different measures of social well-being.
Their rankings should interest people throughout the developed
world, especially the United States.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
The
Cheating Culture:
Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
David Callahan (Harcourt, 2004)
Why do we lie, steal, and cheat? In a conspicuously
unequal nation, an intriguing new book suggests, honesty will probably always
be an afterthought.
TOO
MUCH REVIEW
Perfectly Legal: The Secret Campaign to Rig Our
Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich — And Cheat
Everybody Else
David Cay Johnston (Portfolio, 2003)
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston’s important
new book explores how attacks on America's progressive income tax
have cemented the nation's increasing inequality.
TOO MUCH REVIEW
Wealth and Our Commonwealth:
Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes
Bill Gates Sr. and Chuck Collins (Beacon Press)
Bill Gates Sr., the father of Microsoft's Bill Gates, and veteran
activist Chuck Collins, co-founder of United for a Fair Economy,
have crafted the most readable case for taxing concentrated wealth
since the estate tax first became law 87 years ago.
TOO
MUCH REVIEW
Wealth and Democracy:
A Political History of the American Rich
Kevin Phillips (Broadway Books)
What makes Kevin Phillips so important to the future of American
political life? Just two things: who he is and what he has to say.
What Kevin Phillips has to say, most clearly in his newest book,
is simple and direct: The increasing concentration of wealth in
the United States is driving the country to ruin.
TOO
MUCH REVIEW
Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System
Robley George (Praeger Publishers)
This wide-ranging work explores the notion of establishing a limit
on allowable personable wealth — and connects this exploration
to a survey of the world's great social justice traditions.
Reviews
and more
The Divine Right of Capital
Marjorie Kelly (Berrett Koehler)
‘Maximize shareholder value.’ That’s what
corporate America invariably insists firms must do, at any cost.
Ever wonder why? And ever wonder why only shareholders vote in
corporate elections — and not any other stakeholders in the
decisions corporations make? Marjorie Kelly has.
TOO
MUCH REVIEW
Securing the Fruits of Labor:
The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900
James Huston (Louisiana State University Press)
Would John Adams approve of a United States where the richest 1
percent hold more wealth than the bottom 90 percent?
TOO
MUCH REVIEW
Democratic Distributive Justice
Ross Zucker (Cambridge University Press)
Is true economic justice achievable? Remember, until the late 1700s,
philosophers dismissed democracy as impractical.
TOO
MUCH REVIEW
Classic Inequality-Related Titles
The Big Change:
America Transforms Itself, 1900-1950
Frederick Lewis Allen (Harper & Brothers)
Just over a half century ago, in 1952, America's most
celebrated popular historian set out to write the story of the 20th century's
tumultuous first half. Today, in a time when plutocrats
prance, virtually unchallenged, across America's body politic, his theme can
serve as something of an inspiration for us.
TOO
MUCH REVIEW
The Acquisitive Society
R. H. Tawney (Harcourt Brace)
Back in the 1930s, a University of Chicago project set out to list
the "72 Great Books of Western Civilization." Only one
book by an author then living made the cut. That one book, The
Acquisitive Society by the British academic R. H. Tawney, seldom
gets much attention today. A shame. This slim volume, published
in 1920, may just be the finest book on economic inequality ever
written.
TOO
MUCH REVIEW
Looking Backward
Edward Bellamy (originally published 1888)
A century ago, the most popular novel in America envisioned a United
States that, by the year 2000, had totally conquered inequality.
TOO
MUCH REVIEW
| 
