Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
Robert H. Frank (Princeton University Press, 2017)
A Cornell economist explores how the rhetoric around meritocracy has camouflaged how much success and failure hinge on events completely beyond any individual's control.
Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists
Danny Dorling (Policy Press, 2015)
Wealth may not be trickling down from society’s upper classes, this Oxford University social geographer argues, but the myths that perpetuate systemic inequality are cascading down all around us.
Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy
Robert McChesney (Monthly Review Press, 2014)
An activist and University of Illinois scholar explains how the media entrench upper-class privilege.
The Just Market: Torah’s Response to the Crisis of the Modern Economy
Jonathan Brandow (Langdon Street Press, 2014)
A labor activist explores the ancient Sabbatical and Jubilee years, two annual practices that sought to keep society’s wealth evenly distributed.
On Luxury: A Cautionary Tale. A Short History of the Perils of Excess from Ancient Times to the Beginning of the Modern Era
William Howard Adams (Potomac Books, 2013)
Reflections on the “age-old anxiety” over excess and inequality.
Health, Luck, and Justice
Shlomi Segall (Princeton University Press, 2010)
If the wealthy owe their wealth to luck, how should society respond? Philosophy’s ‘luck egalitarians’ are battling to get that question considered.
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?
Democratic Distributive Justice
Ross Zucker (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Is true economic justice achievable? Remember, until the late 1700s, philosophers dismissed democracy as impractical.
Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good
Carlos Anderson (ACTA Publications, 2015)
Texan Protestant minister argues the pursuit of “just a little bit more” has become the new American religion, with an unholy trinity of commerce, materialism, and consumption.