Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide In America And Its Poisonous Consequences - Hardcover

James Lardner

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9781565849952: Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide In America And Its Poisonous Consequences

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565849957 ISBN 13: 9781565849952

Publisher: The New Press, 2006

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Since the 1970s, the U.S. economy has been sending more and more of its rewards to fewer and fewer people. Once seen as a global exemplar of egalitarianism and middle-class opportunity, America has become the most unequal of developed nations—a land where corporate leaders earn hundreds of times the pay of average workers, and the only population group growing faster than millionaires is the uninsured. Statistics aside, this quarte-century-long trend has changed the texture of American life in ways that threaten our deepest values.

Drawing on the best and latest research, the contributors explore issues such as the real story the numbers tell about how America has changed; dimensions of inequality (education, health, and opportunity); causes of inequality, looking past the usual suspects of technology, trade, and immigration; the persistence of racial disparities; the erosion of democracy and community; and inequality as a moral and religious problem. Not just a catalog of inequality’s ills, the book concludes with a plausible and hopeful policy path—beyond redistribution—to a more just and humane economy.

With contributions by:

Joel Bakan
Heather Boushey and Christian E. Weller
Barbara Ehrenreich
Robert H. Frank
Robert M. Franklin
William Greider
Christopher Jencks
David Cay Johnston
Richard D. Kahlenberg
Robert Kuttner
James Lardner
Betsy Leondar-Wright
Charles Lewis
Meizhu Lui
Bill Moyers
Miles S. Rapoport and David A. Smith
Jonathan Rowe
Theda Skocpol
David A. Smith and Heather McGhee
Jim Wallis
Eric Wanner
David R. Williams and James Lardner

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About the Author:

Jim Lardner is a journalist and the founder of Inequality.org.

David A. Smith is a senior fellow in Business, Society, and Democracy at Demos, a think and action tank in New York City. He previously served as Director of Public Policy at the AFL-CIO and as an aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

From Publishers Weekly:

With the exception of Bill Moyers's fiery foreword, most of the essays in this collection examine the growing divide between the rich and the poor with irrefutable calm. "Today the United States is by far the most unequal rich democracy in the world," Christopher Jencks observes in his essay, "The Fork in the Road," which traces wealth disparity to constitutional design. "Gaps in [college] enrollment by class and race, after declining in the 1960s and 1970s, are once again as wide as they were thirty years ago, and getting wider," remarks Tamara Draut; at the same time, she points out, the wage disparity between college-degree-haves and have-nots grew starker. Meanwhile, Robert H. Frank analyzes how "spending cascades"— in which high-end wage earners "initiate a process that leads to increased expenditures... even among those whose incomes have not risen"—may have aggravated middle class bankruptcy. Though less vividly written than the New York Times' recently published Class Matters, this collection presents a similarly troubling vision of America's economic future. (Dec.)
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