Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences
by Bill Moyers (Foreword), James Lardner (Editor), David A. Smith (Editor)

Softcover: 336 pages
New Press
August 2007
ISBN: 9781595581754, 1595581758

"The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie." - from the introduction by Bill Moyers

Since the 1970s, the U.S. economy has been sending more and more of its rewards to fewer and fewer people. Once seen as a global exemplar of egalitarianism and middle-class opportunity, America has become the most unequal of developed nations - a land where corporate leaders earn hundreds of times the pay of average workers, and the only population group growing faster than millionaires is the uninsured.

Statistics aside, this quarter-century-long trend has changed the texture of American life in ways that threaten our deepest values.

Drawing on the best and latest research, the contributors in this book explore issues such as the real story the numbers tell about how America has changed.

They describe these:

• the dimensions of inequality (education, health, and opportunity),
• the causes of inequality - looking past the usual suspects of technology, trade, and immigration,
• the persistence of racial disparities,
• the erosion of democracy and community, and
• inequality as a moral and religious problem.

But this book is not just a catalog of inequality's ills. Enlightening and compelling, this book concludes with a plausible and hopeful policy path - beyond redistribution - to a more just and humane economy.

Jim Lardner is a journalist and the founder of Inequality.org. David A. Smith is a senior fellow in Business, Society, and Democracy at Demos, a think and action tank in New York City. He previously served as Director of Public Policy at the AFL-CIO and as an aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Contributors include: Barbara Ehrenreich, Robert M. Franklin, Stanley B. Greenberg, William Greider, Lawrence R. Jacobs, Christopher Jencks, David Cay Johnston, Robert Kuttner, Betsy Leondar-Wright, Judith L. Lichtman, Meizhu Lui, Miles Rapoport, Jonathan Rowe, Theda Skocpol, Eric Wanner, David Williams.

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