The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970
Sam Pizzigati (Seven Stories Press, 2012)
How average Americans ended the nation’s original Gilded Age and trimmed America’s awesomely affluent down to democratic size.
Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality
Colin Gordon (Inequality.org, 2018)
A living digital project grapples with the challenges of growing inequality — dimensions, its roots, its causes, and its consequences.
The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America
Rick Wartzman (Hachette, 2017)
How the era of shareholder supremacy has sped the concentration of America’s wealth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thomas Paine and the promise of America
Harvey Kaye (Hill and Wang, 2005)
An engaging guide to America’s first great egalitarian thinker.
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
Kevin Phillips (Broadway Books, 2003)
How the increasing concentration of wealth in the United States has unfolded.
Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900
James Huston (Louisiana State University Press, 1998)
Would John Adams approve of a United States where the richest 1 percent hold more wealth than the bottom 90 percent?