The Price of Inequality
How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
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3.8 • 189 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A forceful argument against America's vicious circle of growing inequality by the Nobel Prize–winning economist.
The top 1 percent of Americans control some 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. But as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains in this best-selling critique of the economic status quo, this level of inequality is not inevitable. Rather, in recent years well-heeled interests have compounded their wealth by stifling true, dynamic capitalism and making America no longer the land of opportunity that it once was. They have made America the most unequal advanced industrial country while crippling growth, distorting key policy debates, and fomenting a divided society. Stiglitz not only shows how and why America’s inequality is bad for our economy but also exposes the effects of inequality on our democracy and on our system of justice while examining how monetary policy, budgetary policy, and globalization have contributed to its growth. With characteristic insight, he diagnoses our weakened state while offering a vision for a more just and prosperous future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his concise and clearly argued newest, Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, outlines the economic, political, and social obstacles currently facing the U.S. and explores possibilities for how we can overcome them. Beginning with the financial collapse of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, Stiglitz (Globalization and Its Discontents) makes the now-ubiquitous point that "the rich were getting richer, while the rest were facing hardships that seem inconsonant with the American dream." The author opines that from this growing gap stem many other sobering social ills, such as "pollution, unemployment, and the degradation of values to the point where everything is acceptable and no one is accountable." And while he contends that our current modus operandi is "neither stable nor sustainable," Stiglitz insists that inequality is not inherent in the system. He then goes on to lay out a plan for the long term, recommending practical changes to macroeconomic policies, taxes, labor laws, and how we navigate a globalizing world and dealing with the deficit. His visions of America's two possible futures reveals the extent of the dishearteningly large socioeconomic rift and its forecasted consequences, but Stiglitz's solutions upheld by experience, perceptive analysis, and copious research could very well bridge that divide, and reduce it in the process.
Customer Reviews
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Clear and well written
Written by a Nobel Prize winner in Economics the author provides a clear and reasonable explaination for the problems we are currently experiencing in this country. While those who only think of their own gain will revile Mr. Stiglitz reasoning and recommendations, people with a concience will read it and understand that the author is not comdemming capitalization outright but saying there is a better way for people to profit but also that there is a way where people can profit but not to the point where most of the population has to suffer while only a few profit. Well written and well documented. Worht the purchase price.
Intelligent, Concise and Practical Progressive Economics
This book is exciting, interesting and thoughtful, and very provocative. It is outstanding, carefully-researched and well-written for an educated, open-minded and sophisticated audience. It offers readers an intelligent progressive thesis with practical real solutions, and it should be an important part of modern global progressive socio-economics curricula as our fragile world is increasingly threatened by small-minded politics, social demagoguery and reactionary regressive economics.