Wealth Inequality
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both." - Louis Brandeis
The Only Real Shortcut to Long-Term Security: Greater Equality (9/25/2024)
America’s problem is massive inequality – not ‘woke’ educated elites (6/11/2024) Robert Reich in the Guardian
Fascism: Income Inequality’s Best Friend Forever
"Societies characterized by enduring deep divisions of income and wealth, such as most third-world societies, are wounded societies with little sense of the common good... As America drifts in this direction, ending poverty and redistributing income should be at the top of the national agenda." Charles Derber, Corporation Nation
American inequality didn't just happen. It was created. Joseph E. Stiglitz
Among the many known effects of inequality on a society are social unrest, a decrease in health, increased violence, and decreased solidarity. Unfortunately, Kohler points out, humans have never been especially good at decreasing inequality peacefully — historically, the only effective methods for doing so are plague, massive warfare, or revolution Huge Human Inequality Study Hints Revolution is in Store for U.S.
“Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.” CAPITAL AND IDEOLOGY By Thomas Piketty
"... inequality does not affect only the poor, but can be detrimental to growth, stability and well-being in general." UN Report: Inequality Matters (pdf).
“measure of political polarization closely parallels measures of economic inequality and of immigration for much of the twentieth century” Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (2007)
In his first major book on the subject of income inequality Noam Chomsky skewers the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism and casts a clear, cold, patient eye on the economic facts of life. What are the ten principles of concentration of wealth and power at work in America today? They’re simple enough: reduce democracy, shape ideology, redesign the economy, shift the burden onto the poor and middle classes, attack the solidarity of the people, let special interests run the regulators, engineer election results, use fear and the power of the state to keep the rabble in line, manufacture consent, marginalize the population. In Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky devotes a chapter to each of these ten principles, and adds readings from some of the core texts that have influenced his thinking to bolster his argument.
It was always a mirage to imagine that you could have a political democracy expressed in elections and not also have an economic democracy. It's really simple. If you allow an economic system in which 1 percent of the people have more than half the wealth and the other 99 percent have to share the other half, then the 1 percent are not going to be so stupid as to not realise that one of the ways you secure yourself is to control the political system. Occupy the Economy, Challenging Capitalism: Richard Wolff pg 85
"There are many other ways in which the government structures the market to redistribute income upward. Read my non-copyright protected book, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer to get more of the picture." Dean Baker (read it on-line.)
Hard Right Billionaires are Spending Lavishly to Reshape State and Federal Courts (10/26/2023)
Survival of the Richest, How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality (1/15/2023)
The grotesque inequality embodied by Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg is a threat to democracy (11/17/2022)
Once upon a time, in the 50s, a family could own a home, a car, send the kids to college, and vacation to enjoy life, all on one income.. and then we cut taxes on the rich, the wealthy hoarded all the money for themselves, and the middle class died.
— mohamad safa (@mhdksafa) October 30, 2021
Equality of Opportunity Project
World Wealth and Income Database (US)
Links
Working for the Few (Oxfam)
Income of Top 1% Rising Again (3/7/2012)
Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength
Agenda For a Shared Prosperity (Download a PDF copy of the entire book)
Toward an Economic Justice Agenda
The Nation, June 30, 2008 issue: The New Inequality
rising inequality and the changing structure of political conflict
Raging wealth inequality in a nutshell:
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) August 25, 2023
People worth less than $10K — 53% of the world’s adult population — hold 1.2% of the world’s assets.
People worth over $1 million — 1.1% of the world’s adult population — hold 46% of the world’s wealth.
Inequality is a global crisis.
The bottom half of America, roughly 30 million Americans, now hold only 2% of the nation's wealth.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) October 1, 2022
Folks, this is unsustainable. The only way to grow the economy and hold on to our democracy is to expand the middle class. Otherwise, oligarchy will devolve into fascism.
Wealth of Elon Musk
— Andrea Junker (@Strandjunker) June 12, 2024
2012: $2,000,000,000
2024: $211,300,000,000
Wealth of Jeff Bezos
2012: $18,400,000,000
2024: $204,900,000,000
Wealth of Mark Zuckerberg
2012: $17,500,000,000
2024: $178,400,000,000
Federal Minimum Wage
2012: $7.25
2024: $7.25
Three words: tax the rich.
Why Government Mostly Helps People Who Need It the Least—Even During a Crisis (7/16/2020) Richard Wolff
Voters May Be Wising Up [Paul Krugman] (3/15/2018)
A Tax Plan to Turbocharge Inequality, in 3 Charts (10/17/2017)
What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Fairness (6/3/2017)
Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world (1/16/2017)
Wealth inequality, the root of many of our most severe problems, has a natural tendency to increase. and, as it does, it corrodes democracy. As Scandinavian countries have shown, it can be slowed somewhat with well designed policy so that everyone benefits. Largely thanks to Republicans, there has been no political will to reign it in the US. It has grown to an extreme not recognized by most people. So the US is governed by the golden rule: who has the gold, rules. When the Supreme Court reinforced this with the Citizen's United decision it was a sad day for our democracy. The election of Trump put billionaires in charge. They passed tax cuts that will accelerate the growth of inequality.
Democracy is not compatible with extreme wealth disparity, which is why we are losing it. Highly progressive taxes supporting strong social programs could bring it back, but looks unlikely. The small number of wealthy have different concerns than most people, and use their power to game the system. They are mostly enthusiastic funders of Republicans. Extreme wealth disparities seem to bring on extreme right government, which is never good. It results in fascism, which, loosely defined, is rule by the wealthy.
They want lower or non-existent taxes, heavy security including strong policing to protect their property, border walls. They don’t need government services like healthcare, childcare, education, because they can easily buy them privately. They keep government small by keeping it from providing social support. Every Republican voted against the COVID relief bill, but they are all taking credit for its benefits to their constituents.
Wealthy hedge fund or private equity interests can buy up small business, consolidate, layoff employees, sell assets, downsize, shut down. Newspapers, far right broadcasters, and other media were targets of this activity. Large areas are now news deserts, or dominated by far right propaganda, particularly in rural areas with heavy votes.
Low wage workers, low taxes, lax environmental laws, and corrupt government make offshore investment profitable. Corporate migration offshore left abandoned factories across the US. They favor an outsized military to safeguard their foreign investments.
Being a minority, they oppose democracy at home or abroad. They need to motivate voters with appeals to the very worst: racists, nativists, super-patriots, religious right, or other authoritarians.
History has been repeatedly about the struggle between oligopoly and democracy. When oligarchs win, there is fascism. We are close.
This is the most important graph. The share of national income going to the richest 10 percent was lowest (and share to lower 90 percent highest) when union membership was at its highest. As unions have weakened, inequality has widened. It's not about economics. It's about power. pic.twitter.com/2snNrTAZUO
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) September 7, 2020
"The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Guyana." Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times 11/7/2010
“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.” — Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not
"on average middle class incomes have grown about three times as fast under Democratic Presidents, working poor incomes ten times as fast." Larry Bartels: The Partisan Political Economy.
"We now see ourselves ruled by a remote class. They may not wear flowing robes, or carry miters, but they are marked in their own way as separate and distinct. The distance between those who will be bailed out and those who will not is the ultimate social distance, and it has grown so vast it now strains the bonds or representation that hold the republic together." Chris Hayes: Twilight of the Elites, America After Meritocracy
"Income inequality in America really is about oligarchs versus everyone else. When the Occupy Wall Street people talk about the 99 percent, they're actually aiming too low." Paul Krugman
"Pretending that the distribution of income and wealth that results from a long set of policy decisions is somehow the natural workings of the market is not a serious position. It might be politically convenient for conservatives who want to lock inequality in place." Dean Baker's book Rigged (download the free pdf).
The distribution of wealth is not determined by nature. It is determined by public policy. Eric Schneiderman, New York State Attorney General
"Concentration of resources in the hands of the top one per cent depresses economic activity and makes life harder for everyone else -particularly those at the bottom of the economic ladder." Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director of Oxfam
"Throughout my twelve years in Congress, alarming figures about the economic stagnation of middle and lower income Americans were readily available. The figures are worse today. From 1979 to 2005 the top 1 percent of American earners received more than one-third of all gains in national income, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent recieved over one-fifth of all after-tax income gains during that period. By contrast, the bottom 60 percent received only 13.5 percent of all gains in national income. As Hacker and Pierson point ou in their Winner-Take-All Politics." Tom Allen: Dangerous Convictions.
"... high levels of inequality strain the bonds that hold us together as a society. There has been a long-term downward trend in the extent to which Americans trust either the government or one another. In the sixties, most Americans agreed with the proposition that “most people can be trusted”; today most disagree.’ In the sixties, most Americans believed that the government is run “for the benefit of all”; today, most believe that it’s run for “a few big interests.” And there’s convincing evidence that growing inequality is behind our growing cynicism, which is making the United States seem increasingly like a Latin American country. As the political scientists Eric Uslaner and Mitchell Brown point out (and support with extensive data), “In a world of haves and have-nots, those at either end of the economic spectrum have little reason to believe that ‘most people can be trusted’ . ..social trust rests on a foundation of economic equality.” Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal pg 251
Economists who say we should relegate questions about inequality to philosophers often advocate policies, like tax cuts for the wealthy, that increase inequality substantially. That greater inequality causes real harm is beyond doubt. Robert H. Frank, New York Times, 10/17/2010
"Aristotle, who saw extreme inequality as the fundamental cause of revolution, argues in Politics that the rise of an oligarchic state leads to one of two scenarios. The impoverished underclass can revolt and overthrow the oligarchs to rectify the imbalance of wealth and power, or it can submit to the tyranny of oligarchic rule." Chris Hedges, Wages of Rebellion pg 82
In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through Communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse ... It's a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if there's a fourth way out." Peter Thiel
Wealth inequality is at the root of our most basic problems: election malfunction, political corruption, class warfare, courts that provide lesser justice for the wealthy, growing aristocracy, and a potential for a new birth of Fascism.
In extreme, it wiped out European royalty, and is the cause of economic instability (think 1929).
It also produces grinding poverty. (The GOP, the party of the wealthy, doesn't think healthcare is a right and has no plan to make it universal, nor has it restored CHIP, the children's health program.)
Wealth inequality is corrosive. When it becomes extreme, not only is it unfair, demand dries up, market volatility increases, and the economy crashes. There is a direct correlation between social dysfunction and income inequality. Democracy dies as concentrated wealth takes power. The Constitution rightly recognized that concentration of power must be checked, except it didn't bother to do it in the private sector nor did it anticipate the collusion of big private data with an increasingly secret government agencies.
Banks are larger than ever and Congress agreed to bail them out if they get in trouble. This is lemon socialism: bailouts for the wealthy, nothing for anyone else. The latest Republican tax bill puts income inequality on steroids.
Care to guess if this is followed by another great depression ?
Wealth inequality is created by government policy, naturally tends to increase over time, and is much more extreme than most people realize. It is at the root of many problems: campaign finance, rigged elections, bought government, policy error, media distortion, market failure, social pathology, corruption, economic volatility, systemic malfunction, class warfare. As it rises world-wide, democracy is in retreat.
Government should limit it, otherwise in the extreme there is little social mobility, sham democracy, and wide discontent. The Republican tax plan will exacerbate it as the largest part will go to the top 1%
Nordic countries are better at keeping it
under control, probably because they have higher taxes, stronger unions,
public media, less corruption,
better government, and a strong social safety net.
A strong safety net can help to limit it and stabilize the economy: Welfare, Social security, health care, public education, child care, paid leave, secure retirement are all effective, humane policies. Universal voting rights, range voting, strong unions, worker representation in management, progressive taxation, inheritance taxes are all helpful. Republicans, fixated on money, oppose them all, and actually exacerbate the problem with austerity and massive tax cuts for the wealthy. The billionaires, like Trump, get huge windfalls if they can repeal the inheritance tax.
When corporations consolidate, it is usually to reduce payrolls, and limit competition. They lobby for deregulation so that they are free to pollute. Oligarchs are created and paid astronomical sums.
It was always a mistake for corporations to take on social responsibility. They move operations to low wage countries if they can, bust unions,reduce wages and benefits like pensions, health care. Without effective regulation or anti-trust enforcement, whole industries, such as media, become dysfunctional, corrupt, or predatory. Deregulation of the financial sector makes it much more likely that taxpayers will bail out big banks when the next crisis strikes. Banks too big to fail assure it WILL happen again. That's lemon socialism: bailouts for the rich and nothing for the poor.
As the wealthy game the system for themselves, the economy becomes unstable, unfair, and unsustainable. Government controlled by the funders, not the people, often does the wrong thing. Democracy withers, an irresponsible elite games the system to reward itself, a strong-man dictator takes over, police are militarized to keep the people down, military adventures continue the forever war.
A weak economy moves people to right-wing (Republican) politics, so if they again vote for tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, privatization, the downward cycle is sure to continue. Republicans are always planning for large deficits by cutting Social Security, Medicare and other social programs.
When corporations control government that, by definition, is Fascism. Right wing politicians use racism, nativism, and other discrimination as blame for problems. A strong man becomes head of state declaring the nation is exceptional. The military and police are expanded to match rising paranoia. Money is no object to renew and expand the nuclear arsenal. Provocative actions are evident on the far-flung borders of the empire. Corporations ramp up arms production for assured profit from their one customer, the government(s). Don't think it is for the protection of the people.
This could be a Weimar moment.
Fascism: Income Inequality’s Best Friend Forever (7/21/2016
Richest
62 people as wealthy as half of world's population, says Oxfam (1/18/2016)
Bernie Sanders Plan to Reduce Inequality
Inequality Is Killing Middle America (12/8/2015)
Top 1 percent own more than half of world’s wealth (10/14/2015)
35 Mind-Blowing Facts About Inequality (7/13/2015)
If
Inequality Worries Republicans, Why Do They Keep Making It Worse? (4/17/2015)
The Shrinking American Middle Class (1/26/2015)
How
Soaring Inequality May Lead the World Down the Path of Fascism (1/2/2015)
How the GOP Redistributes Wealth (12/26/2014)
How Inequality Is Killing the American Dream ... And What We Can Do About It (11/20/2014)
Janet Yellen on Income Inequality (10/17/2014)
Beware Plutocrats, the Pitchforks are coming (8/2014)
Piketty's New Class (7/1/2014)
The
wealthiest get 20 more years of life in good health than the most
deprived (3/14/2014)
A
Note on Economic Growth (11/20/2013)
Inequality is a choice: Stiglitz (10/13/2013)
Ralph
Nader on Income Inequality and the Minimum Wage (3/25/2013) C-SPAN
video (43:)
The
United States of Inequality (Bill Moyers
4/12/2013)
The Price of Inequality: Joseph Stiglitz (6/20/2012) See his Video (about an hour)
Free
Market Outcomes are Not Fair and Not Free (12/2012)
Why the Economy can't get out of first gear: The Rich have sucked it
dry : Reich (6/13/2012)
The American Dream is a myth: Stiglitz (6/5/2012)
Growing Income Gap May Leave U.S. Vulnerable (10/13/2011)
US Ranks Near the Bottom in Income Inequality (9/19/2011)
Plutonomy and the Precariat
Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness
Of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) only Turkey and Mexico have more unequal societies than the United States. Dodging Extinction: Anthony D. Barnosky
Income inequality is at the root of many problems: campaign
finance, bought government, media distortion,
market failure, social pathology, corruption, systemic
malfunction, class warfare, policy error. It's why government often
does the wrong thing. It has a natural tendency to increase, and, as it
does, renders most people powerless. It results in an economy that is unstable, unfair, and
unsustainable; a political system that is corrupt and undemocratic; media that is untrustworthy; justice only for the
wealthy, elections that can be purchased.
The Constitution rightly attempted to block concentration of public power, but not private. But wealth is power, and both have become extremely concentrated. The U.S. is an oligopoly.
The US Congress creates the environment that breeds oligarchs, and is now run by oligarchs. Media moguls control pretty much everything broadcast. Bankers get unlimited bailouts of taxpayer money without strings. The Congress often gets it wrong because it is money driven. Anti-trust enforcement is a forgotten relic. Democracy withers when income disparities are extreme. We have a strong-man Presidency, but, thanks to the Supreme Court, Corporations rule, not the people. That is a powerful force for Fascism.
Concentration of wealth is a major cause of our difficulties and as it increased, which it undoubtedly has, we become less able to deal with our problems: Demand weakens, social mobility disappears, market volatility increases, large amounts of money game the system, government becomes dysfunctional because it is hooked on campaign money. Democracy withers away. Plutocracy rules. With Citizen's United, corruption is assured.
Large disparities in income are bad for democracy, bad for the
general welfare, bad for the economy. They
lead to social pathologies, inequity in the Courts, destroy domestic tranquility,
suppress economic activity, and because we have ignored it, we experienced yet another economic collapse.
Republicans ignore this problem
because they are on the wealthy side of the class struggle. Their religious hypocrisy is on full display with
their harsh policies for the poor. (See the Ryan budget.) The
end result of relentless concentration is extreme inequality followed by financial collapse, in which
everyone is a loser.
James Gilligan, formerly at the Harvard Medical School, Director of Mental Health Services for Massachusetts prisons, and now Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University has written a book "Why Some Politicians are more Dangerous that Others”. In it, he finds that violent deaths (murder and suicides) are strongly correlated with Republican Presidencies.
There is evidence that high levels of income inequality, as in the US, are highly correlated with corruption. (1, 2)
Republicans brought on the financial crisis with deregulation that allowed markets to go out of control, privatization that removed the public from the process, tax cuts that in effect directed massive public debt into deep private pockets (banana republic), civil service destruction and cronyism placed incompetents in public office; regressive, anti-labor policies led to a general decline in consumption; a determination to build an empire for world domination requires unlimited budget for the military; a contempt for international law covered up illegal activities including torture, renditions, secret prisons Congress did no oversight during the Bush years; regulatory agencies were captives of the industries they were supposed to regulate; industry migrated to low wage countries and not much was done to mitigate the damage; but there was war enough for everyone. War is profitable, and in its chaos pallet loads of shrink wrapped money just disappeared. Civil liberties here in the good old US of A were cut down to size by chicken hawks who built the profitable national security state. PayGo left.
There is a relatively simple way damp down obscene compensation,
to pay our bills (which we are not), to reduce inequality and to
keep up our infrastructure, and that is to restore a stiff graduated income tax. Continue the estate
tax to be sure that we do not create an aristocracy,
and to break up extreme concentrations of wealth with a renewal of anti-trust oversight.
Anti-trust should preserve competition where it can.
The Constitution has an inherent warning about concentrated power, but it has little to say about private power. Anti-trust efforts faded away. We are seeing media that is too concentrated, banks that should be broken up, insurance companies that can kill health care reforms, oil companies that successfully deny climate change. We have allowed the military to become too large and it now threatens our civil liberties. You no longer have fourth or sixth amendment rights. When corporations run government, that is the very definition of fascism. Do we not have that ?
In 1929 inequality reached new heights, the market crashed, and there was widespread misery. It has happened again and we have not yet recovered. Worse, those banks that were too big to fail got bailed out by taxpayers. As Larry Lessig pointed out, this is the stupidest form of socialism ever invented.
Wide income inequality leads to market volatility, lack of
demand, little competition among big corporations, widespread
misery, anti-social behavior, environment devastating, corporate
behavior. Institutional racial bias keeps
minorities in prisons in much larger
proportions, which in turn excludes them from voting.
Concentrated wealth, a reliable product of uncontrolled capitalism, becomes aristocracy results in low social mobility. Wages go down, necessities become more expensive, education out of reach for most, and wealthy build gated communities and arm themselves to protect from growing chaos. Students and many others are driven into debt servitude. Republican policy is hastening the process.
Many of the social pathologies are identified in
The Spirit Level, Why Greater Equality Makes Societies
Stronger: Â Richard
Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
Through history, economic cycles are strongly correlated with
levels of concentrated wealth. When out of control, there are at least 3
known ways to fix it:
-
FDR proposed a Second Bill of Rights, which would have provided a social safety net for everyone. This is the mildest and most humane way to damp down inequality, but Republicans would never favor it. They are in control and the military state is ascendant. Most likely, we are doomed.
-
Economic turmoil can easily produce a fascist state as the Germans learned. The Bush family helped finance the Nazis. Republicans seem to crave a Fascist State. At the extreme, like Rome, we become an empire, which requires a large standing military. That is the direct cause of the loss of civil liberties, and ultimately results in a dictatorship, because representative government cannot deal with an empire. Since empire is ruinously expensive, people's standard of living must necessarily fall. The elite game the system for themselves driving the majority into servitude. Official activity must be carried out in secret. Media cannot reveal the truth. In history, every empire collapses. A World War devastates the country, as happened in Germany, and reduces income inequality.
-
The other way, as seen in France, Russia, early America and other countries, is revolution. When people become sufficiently dissatisfied and desperate, they will throw off the ruling elite.
-
A World War will also do the job, but another will most likely be nuclear and may destroy us all.
Why
Greater Equality Makes Us Stronger
Residential
Income Segregation in America (11/16/2011)
Ten
Reasons to Care About Economic Inequality
(10/24/2011)
New Study of
Income Inequality (10/2011)
The
More Inequality, the Less the Sustained Growth
(9/16/2011)
Inequality
Has Wrecked The Economy (9/5/2011)
Look Out, Are You About to Join the White Underclass?
By
"We're starting to hear a little discussion about the white
underclass... Mainly because so many middle class folks are
terrified of falling into it."/p>
Economic Recovery for the Few (8/1/2010)
The Impact of Income Inequality
Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality
Equality of Opportunity Project
Inequality.org
From Too Much: Most Popular Articles
Tracking Inequality
How Inequality Hurts
Executive Pay
Defective Enterprises
Taxing Progressively
Alternate Approaches
We are not in this together (4/11/2009)E
This Is What the Class War Looks Like (3/24/2009)
Distributing
Our Technological Inheritance: Gar
Alperovitz
“Chances of achieving the ‘American Dream’ are almost two times higher in Canada than the United States,” showing slide with data to back up the claim." Raj Chetty (Boston Globe)
UN: Financial Inequality Rapidly Grows in US
A United Nations report has revealed major US cities, including New York, Washington, Atlanta and New Orleans, have levels of economic inequality that rival cities in Africa. The report found that the United States had the highest inequality and poverty after Mexico and Turkey, and the gap has increased rapidly since 2000. The life expectancy of African Americans in the United States is about the same as that of people living in China and some states of India. http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/27/headlines#16
Steve Kangas on inequality in the Reagan Years
Links
Video
Joseph Stiglitz: The Price of Inequality (video ) 2012
The End of Poverty ? 2008. 105 minutes narrated by Martin Sheen. View it on-line.
Bibliography
Limitarianism, the Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns
It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders
The Crisis of the Middle Class Constitution, Why Wealth Inequality Threatens Our Republic by Ganesh Sitaraman
"There are many other ways in which the government structures the market to redistribute income upward. Read my non-copyright protected book, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer to get more of the picture." Dean Baker (read it on-line.)
Inequality, What Can Be Done? Anthony B. Atkinson
A BRIEF HISTORY OF EQUALITY By Thomas Piketty
Requiem for the American Dream: The Principles of Concentrated Wealth and Power, Noam Chomsky
LET THEM EAT TWEETS, How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality By Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer: Dean Baker (free to download)
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century: Walter Scheidel
THE CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTITUTION, Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic: Ganesh Sitaraman
Plutocrats United, Rick Hasen
The Vanishing Middle Class: Peter Temin
Inequality - What Can Be Done? Anthony B. Atkinson
The Anatomy of Inequality, Its Social and Economic Origins and Solutions: Per Molander
Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America: Martin Gilens
Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer: Dean Baker (download the free pdf)
Uneqal Democracy, the Political Economy of the New Gilded Age: Larry Bartels
The Spirit Level, Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges
Runaway Inequality, an Activists' Guide to Economic Justice: Les Leopold
How to Slide Down the Great Gatsby Curve:
Our Kids, The American Dream in Crisis: Robert Putnam
The Price of Paradise: David Trout
Screwed, the Undeclared War against the Middle Class: Thom Hartmann
Inequality
in America: Stephen M. Caliendo
Divided, the
Perils of our Growing Inequality: Edited by David Cay Johnson
Winner
Take All Politics: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (!) Makes the case that politics is the primary
driver of inequality in the US. Started in 1978.
Capital
in the Twenty-First Century: Thomas Piketty.
The divide : American injustice in the age of the wealth gap / Matt Taibbi
Divided:
The Perils of Our New Inequality: David Cay Johnston
The Price of Inequality: Joseph E.Stiglitz
Capital as Power. A Study of Order and Creorder: Nitzan, Jonathan and Bichler, Shimshon. (2009) pdf
The
Cost of Inequality: Stewart Lansley
The Great Divergence: Timothy Noah
99 to 1: Chuck Collins
With Liberty and Justice for Some: Glenn Greenwald
Pinched: Don Peck
Ill Fares the Land: Tony Judt
Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War: Joe Bageant (an excerpt)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America: Barbara Ehrenreich
THE WORKING CLASS MAJORITY America's Best Kept Secret: Michael Zweig
Unjust Deserts: Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly
Retirement Insecurity: Edward N. Wolff
Politics of Rich and Poor: Kevin Phillips
Winner Take All Society: Robert Frank and Philip Cook
The Cost of Talent: Derek Bok
Boiling Point, Democrats, Republicans and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity: Kevin Phillips
Obamanomics, How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics: John R. Talbott
A People's History of the United States: Howard Zinn