INEQUALITY, CLASS AND ECONOMICS
Editing this book, which has just been published, was one of my favorite projects last year. Written by economist Eric Schutz, Inequality, Class and Economics is an accessible and compelling history of rising economic inequality in the United States and its connection to class and power.
Here’s a sample:
“It is sometimes argued that great and increasing economic disparities such as are now commonplace in the United States need not necessarily be of much concern in an economically mobile society like ours. The sting of inequality is supposedly lessened by the possibility of “moving up the ladder.” Yet mobility is merely another part of the myth of American classlessness. Other nations show significantly greater mobility up the income ladder, both between generations and within one generation, than the United States….Statistical studies today indicate that the ease of movement from one income level to another in the United States has actually declined greatly since the Second World War. Not only is the length of the ladder increasing as the degree of wealth and income inequality rises; it is also getting harder to climb the ladder as upward mobility is decreasing.”