Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
Branko Milanovic (Belknap Press, 2016)
This influential economist takes us back hundreds of years, and as far around the world as data allow, to show that inequality moves in cycles, fueled by war and disease, technological disruption, access to education, and redistribution.
Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice
Les Leopold (Labor Institute Press, 2015)
How can the U.S. be the wealthiest country on Earth and yet have such high poverty and inequality? The President of the Labor Institute explains the state of contemporary inequality while focusing on how to fix the problems.
Inequality and the 1%
Danny Dorling (Verso, 2014)
A University of Oxford social geographer explains why we cannot afford the rich.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty (Harvard University Press, 2014)
A French economist explores how unequal we have become and how terrifyingly more unequal we may soon be.
Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality
David Cay Johnston, editor (The New Press, 2014)
An anthology that offers revelations aplenty for anyone wanting to get a better handle on why we need to worry about extreme inequality — and just how we can end it.
The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream?
Earl Wysong, Robert Perrucci, and David Wright (Rowman & Littlefield, fourth edition, 2014)
How economic classes in the United States segment and interrelate — in an increasingly unequal nation.
The Wealth Inequality Reader, fourth edition
Linda Pinkow, Sam Pizzigati, and the Dollars & Sense collective (Economic Affairs Bureau, 2013)
From stats on inequality to strategies for overcoming it.
The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future
Joseph Stiglitz (W.W. Norton, 2012)
A Nobel Prize-winning economist paints a vivid picture.
99 To 1: How Wealth Inequality Is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It
Chuck Collins (Berrett-Koehler, 2012)
A leading economic justice activist clearly and compellingly spells out how unequal we’ve become — and why.
Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
Chrystia Freeland (Penguin, 2012)
A veteran business editor sharpens the focus on the top 0.1 percent.
The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
Timothy Noah (Bloomsbury Press, 2012)
A dispassionate dissection of the various explanations — and obfuscations — that analysts have advanced to help us figure out why we’ve become so unequal.
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (Simon & Schuster, 2010)
Two top political scientists tell us when America turned terribly wrong — and how the rich and powerful organized to do the turning.
The Trouble with Billionaires
Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks (Viking Canada, 2010)
Our ultra rich don’t just have humungous piles of cash. They have, argues this sprightly look at uber wealth, enormous political power, too, enough to make life far rougher for the rest of us than it ever needs to be.
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (Bloomsbury Press, 2009)
By every measure that matters, from social trust to how long we live, relatively equal nations outperform nations where income concentrates at the top.
Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality
Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Americans, our pundits would have us believe, are too busy trying to become rich to worry about living a society where the rich rule. Actual polling data tell a totally different story.
Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back
Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly (The New Press, 2008)
If you’re so smart, the classic put-down goes, why aren’t you rich? But our smarts don’t make us rich. These two authors know what does.
Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?
Jared Bernstein (Berrett-Koehler, 2008)
How inequality is undermining the lives average Americans lead.
Super Rich: The Rise of Inequality in Britain and the United States
George Irvin (Polity Press, 2008)
To overcome the global meltdown all around us, this British economist reminds us, we need to go back to the future — back to becoming a society that values greater equality.
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.
Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich
Robert Frank (Crown, 2007)
The best up-close profile of life at the economic summit.
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.
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.”
Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences
Edited by James Lardner and David A. Smith (NewPress, 2005)
Inspired by a 2004 national conference held in New York, this essay collection is brimming with insights about inequality and our contemporary condition.
Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity
Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel (New Press, 2005)
This new edition of a work originally published in 2000 makes a useful introductory text for classrooms and study groups.
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.
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. Why we should care and what we can do.