Download or read book Inequality Class and Economics written by Eric Schutz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-01-24 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the economic inequalities pervading every aspect of society - and then multiplied them to a staggering degree. In Inequality, Class, and Economics, Eric Schutz illuminates the pillars undergirding the monstrous polarities which define our times revealing them as the structures of power that constitute the foundations of the class system of today's capitalism. Employers' power is the linchpin of that system, but the power of professionals in all fields, the power exerted by some businesses over others, political power, and the power of cultural institutions - especially mass media and education - are also critical for the class system today. Each of these social power structures is examined closely and shown both to sustain, and to be sustained by, economic inequality. Employing both traditional and novel approaches to public policy, Inequality, Class, and Economics denounces economists' studied avoidance of the problem of class as a system of inequality based in unequal opportunity, and exhorts us to tackle the heart of the problem at long last."--Back cover.

Download or read book Income Inequality written by Janet C. Gornick and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This state-of-the-art volume presents comparative, empirical research on a topic that has long preoccupied scholars, politicians, and everyday citizens: economic inequality. While income and wealth inequality across all populations is the primary focus, the contributions to this book pay special attention to the middle class, a segment often not addressed in inequality literature. Written by leading scholars in the field of economic inequality, all 17 chapters draw on microdata from the databases of LIS, an esteemed cross-national data center based in Luxembourg. Using LIS data to structure a comparative approach, the contributors paint a complex portrait of inequality across affluent countries at the beginning of the 21st century. The volume also trail-blazes new research into inequality in countries newly entering the LIS databases, including Japan, Iceland, India, and South Africa.

Download or read book Inequality and Power written by Eric A. Schutz and published by . This book was released on 2012-06-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the causes and consequences of economic inequality in modern advanced market economies, offering an economic analysis of the power structures constituting the social class system. After considering what is wrong with power-based inequality in terms of criteria of distributive justice and economic functionality, it concludes with an outline of various possible correctives.

Download or read book Varieties of Economic Inequality written by Sebastiano Fadda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently, the issue of inequality has regained attention in economic and political debates. Although this interest is welcome, the debate is still mostly focused on income or wealth distribution, which is an important aspect but does not present a complete view of inequality. Most of the theoretical and empirical studies produced by economists concern personal income distribution or factor income distribution. This is more evident in the studies of the evolution and characteristics of contemporary capitalism and globalization. Varieties of Economic Inequality considers both theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence of aspects such as income, gender, race, technology, power, region, education and class. Ultimately, this text rejects the idea of supposed long run constant factor shares, the positive effects of inequality and the greater importance of absolute level of income compared to its unequal distribution, and instead reveals the structural inequalities that exist within societies. This book advocates a move away from the focusing on inequality at the level of the individual and suggests policy for eradicating these various forms of inequality. It is suitable for those who study political economy, social inequality as well as economic theory and philosophy.

Download or read book Economic Apartheid In America written by Chuck Collins and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition of the widely touted Economic Apartheid in America looks at the causes and manifestations of wealth disparities in the United States, including tax policy in light of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and recent corporate scandals. Published with two leading organizations dedicated to addressing economic inequality, the book looks at recent changes in income and wealth distribution and examines the economic policies and shifts in power that have fueled the growing divide. Praised by Sojurners as “a clear blueprint on how to combat growing inequality,” Economic Apartheid in America provides “much-needed groundwork for more democratic discussion and participation in economic life” (Tikkun). With “a wealth of eye-opening data” (The Beacon) focusing on the decline of organized labor and civic institutions, the battle over global trade, and the growing inequality of income and wages, it argues that most Americans are shut out of the discussion of the rules governing their economic lives. Accessible and engaging and illustrated throughout with charts, graphs, and political cartoons, the book lays out a comprehensive plan for action.

Download or read book Inequality Class and Economics written by Eric A. Schutz and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the economic inequalities pervading every aspect of society - and then multiplied them to a staggering degree. In Inequality, Class, and Economics, Eric Schutz illuminates the pillars undergirding the monstrous polarities which define our times revealing them as the structures of power that constitute the foundations of the class system of today's capitalism. Employers' power is the linchpin of that system, but the power of professionals in all fields, the power exerted by some businesses over others, political power, and the power of cultural institutions - especially mass media and education - are also critical for the class system today. Each of these social power structures is examined closely and shown both to sustain, and to be sustained by, economic inequality. Employing both traditional and novel approaches to public policy, Inequality, Class, and Economics denounces economists' studied avoidance of the problem of class as a system of inequality based in unequal opportunity, and exhorts us to tackle the heart of the problem at long last."--Back cover.

Download or read book The Crisis of the Middle Class Constitution written by Ganesh Sitaraman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system. For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic? The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution is a tour de force of history, philosophy, law, and politics. It makes a compelling case that inequality is more than just a moral or economic problem; it threatens the very core of our constitutional system.

Download or read book The Economics of Inequality written by Thomas Piketty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics. This work now appears in English for the first time.

Download or read book Capitalists Arise written by Peter Georgescu and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2017-05 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Showing how the short-term thinking spawned by shareholder primacy lies at the root of our current economic malaise and social breakdown, this sobering depiction offers concrete actions that capitalists themselves can take to create a better future. --

Download or read book The Economics of Education written by Daniele Checchi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-23 with total page 5 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an important contribution to educational policy, Daniele Checchi offers an economic perspective on the demand and supply of education. He explores the reasons why, beyond a certain point, investment in education has not resulted in reductions in social inequalities. Starting with the seminal work of Gary Becker, Checchi provides an extensive survey of the literature on human capital and social capital formation. He draws on individual data on intergenerational transmission of income and education for the USA, Germany and Italy, as well as aggregate data on income and educational inequality for a much wider range of countries. Checchi explores whether resources spent in education are effective in raising students' achievement, as well as analysing alternative ways of financing education. The Economics of Education thus provides the analytical tools necessary to understand the complex relationships between current income inequality, access to education and future inequality.

Download or read book Economic Inequality and Higher Education written by Stacy Dickert-Conlin and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2007-06-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vast disparities in college attendance and graduation rates between students from different class backgrounds is a growing social concern. Economic Inequality and Higher Education investigates the connection between income inequality and unequal access to higher education, and proposes solutions that the state and federal governments and schools themselves can undertake to make college accessible to students from all backgrounds. Economic Inequality and Higher Education convenes experts from the fields of education, economics, and public policy to assess the barriers that prevent low-income students from completing college. For many students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, the challenge isn't getting into college, but getting out with a degree. Helping this group will require improving the quality of education in the community colleges and lower-tier public universities they are most likely to attend. Documenting the extensive disjuncture between the content of state-mandated high school testing and college placement exams, Michael Kirst calls for greater alignment between K-12 and college education. Amanda Pallais and Sarah Turner examine barriers to access at elite universities for low-income students—including tuition costs, lack of information, and poor high school records—as well as recent initiatives to increase socioeconomic diversity at private and public universities. Top private universities have increased the level and transparency of financial aid, while elite public universities have focused on outreach, mentoring, and counseling, and both sets of reforms show signs of success. Ron Ehrenberg notes that financial aid policies in both public and private universities have recently shifted towards merit-based aid, away from the need-based aid that is most helpful to low-income students. Ehrenberg calls on government policy makers to create incentives for colleges to increase their representation of low-income students. Higher education is often vaunted as the primary engine of upward mobility. Instead, as inequality in America rises, colleges may be reproducing income disparities from one generation to the next. Economic Inequality and Higher Education illuminates this worrisome trend and suggests reforms that educational institutions and the government must implement to make the dream of a college degree a reality for all motivated students.

Download or read book The Upside of Inequality written by Edward Conard and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scourge of America’s economy isn't the success of the 1 percent—quite the opposite. The real problem is the government’s well-meaning but misguided attempt to reduce the payoffs for success. Four years ago, Edward Conard wrote a controversial bestseller, Unintended Consequences, which set the record straight on the financial crisis of 2008 and explained why U.S. growth was accelerating relative to other high-wage economies. He warned that loose monetary policy would produce neither growth nor inflation, that expansionary fiscal policy would have no lasting benefit on growth in the aftermath of the crisis, and that ill-advised attempts to rein in banking based on misplaced blame would slow an already weak recovery. Unfortunately, he was right. Now he’s back with another provocative argument: that our current obsession with income inequality is misguided and will only slow growth further. Using fact-based logic, Conard tracks the implications of an economy now constrained by both its capacity for risk-taking and by a shortage of properly trained talent—rather than by labor or capital, as was the case historically. He uses this fresh perspective to challenge the conclusions of liberal economists like Larry Summers and Joseph Stiglitz and the myths of “crony capitalism” more broadly. Instead, he argues that the growing wealth of most successful Americans is not to blame for the stagnating incomes of the middle and working classes. If anything, the success of the 1 percent has put upward pressure on employment and wages. Conard argues that high payoffs for success motivate talent to get the training and take the risks that gradually loosen the constraints to growth. Well-meaning attempts to decrease inequality through redistribution dull these incentives, gradually hurting not just the 1 percent but everyone else as well. Conard outlines a plan for growing middle- and working-class wages in an economy with a near infinite supply of labor that is shifting from capital-intensive manufacturing to knowledge-intensive, innovation-driven fields. He urges us to stop blaming the success of the 1 percent for slow wage growth and embrace the upside of inequality: faster growth and greater prosperity for everyone.

Download or read book Markets and Power written by Eric A. Schutz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In what ways do the actions and economic behavior of today's multinational corporations resemble the functioning and processes of the old command economics of the Soviet Union? By ignoring questions about power relations in markets, mainstream neoclassically-oriented economists conclude that there are no significant power structures operating in market systems to control allocation and distribution. This book argues to the contrary that there are fundamental and systemic power structures - monopoly, access to information or finance, employer power, etc. - at work in market economies, which affects their ability to achieve real "competition" in much the same way as state-controlled, command economies hinder business activities. Thus, for example, the biggest firms at the hubs of financial "networks" wield a kind of "shaping power" upon large numbers of relatively autonomous firms, not only upon those that belong to the networks but also on the many firms outside them that are also affected.

Download or read book The Color of Wealth written by Barbara Robles and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2006-06-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For every dollar owned by the average white family in the United States, the average family of color has less than a dime. Why do people of color have so little wealth? The Color of Wealth lays bare a dirty secret: for centuries, people of color have been barred by laws and by discrimination from participating in government wealth-building programs that benefit white Americans. This accessible book—published in conjunction with one of the country’s leading economics education organizations—makes the case that until government policy tackles disparities in wealth, not just income, the United States will never have racial or economic justice. Written by five leading experts on the racial wealth divide who recount the asset-building histories of Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and European Americans, this book is a uniquely comprehensive multicultural history of American wealth. With its focus on public policies—how, for example, many post–World War II GI Bill programs helped whites only—The Color of Wealth is the first book to demonstrate the decisive influence of government on Americans’ net worth.

Download or read book Inequality and Power written by Eric A. Schutz and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2011-03-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the causes and consequences of economic inequality in the advanced market economies of today. It is common that in market systems people choose their own individual economic destinies, but of course the choices people make are importantly determined by the alternatives available to them: unequal opportunity is the critical determinant of economic disparities. This begs the question; from where do the vast inequalities of opportunity arise? This book theorizes that power and social class are the real crux of economic inequality. Most of mainstream economics studiously eschews questions involving social power, preferring to focus instead on "individual choice subject to constraint" in contexts of "well-functioning markets". Yet both "extra-market" power structures and power structures arising from within the market system itself are unavoidably characteristic of real-world market-based economies. The normal working of labor and financial markets engenders an inherent wealth-favoring bias in the distribution of opportunities for occupational choice. But that bias is greatly compounded by the economic, social, political and cultural power structures that constitute the class system. For those power structures work to distribute economic benefit to class elites, and are in turn undergirded by the disparities of wealth they thus help engender. Inequality and Power offers an economic analysis of the power structures constituting that class system: employers’ power over employees; the power of certain businesses over others; professionals’ power over their clients and other employees; cultural power in the media and education systems; and political power in "democratic" government. Schutz argues that a "class analysis" of the trend of increasing economic inequality today is superior to the mainstream economic analysis of that trend. After considering what is wrong with power-based inequality in term of criteria of distributive justice and economic functionality, the book concludes with an outline of various possible correctives. This book should be of interest to students and researchers in economics, sociology, political science and philosophy, as well as anyone interested in the theories of social class.

Download or read book Capital in the Twenty First Century written by Thomas Piketty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

Download or read book The Return of Inequality written by Mike Savage and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions. The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies. Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved beyond: empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution. Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy: faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.