Good Reads
for your bookshelf

Recent general surveys
of our unequal economic landscape

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 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?
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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.
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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.
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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

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Democratic Distributive Justice
Ross Zucker (Cambridge University Press)
Is true economic justice achievable? Remember, until the late 1700s, philosophers dismissed democracy as impractical.
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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.
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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.
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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