The Price of Inequality
A forceful argument against America's vicious circle of growing inequality by the Nobel Prize-winning economist. America currently has the most inequality, and the least equality of opportunity, among the advanced countries. While market forces play a role in this stark picture, politics has shaped those market forces. In this best-selling book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz exposes the efforts of well-heeled interests to compound their wealth in ways that have stifled true, dynamic capitalism. Along the way he examines the effect of inequality on our economy, our democracy, and our system of justice. Stiglitz explains how inequality affects and is affected by every aspect of national policy, and with characteristic insight he offers a vision for a more just and prosperous future, supported by a concrete program to achieve that vision.
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6recommend
9mentions
9people
2013–2024years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The books that touches exactly that ideas are amongst other
* "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" - Thomas Piketty
* "The Spirit Level" - Wilkinson & Pickett
* "The Price of Inequality" - Joseph Stiglitz
However, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if none of these authors ring a bell.
But is seems like you are perfectly able to articulate the ideas - just not to internalize them. Yet.
- If anyone enjoys reading about income inequality, I also recommend Joseph Stiglitz' book called "The Price of Inequality". He speaks of inequality more from an American perspective and he's one of the thought leaders I personally like to hear from.
I am a staunch Capitalist and I'd like to see another great era of America ingenuity and invention. I think the path to solve inequality comes from creating wealth and solving big global issues in energy, health and transportation.
- Related from 2003 by Jim Sanford: "Confessions of a Recovering Economist" http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue21/Stanford21.htm "I am an economist. It is seventeen days since I last uttered the phrase "supply and demand." But the demon still lurks untamed, within me. Economics is an addiction. Every other addiction has a Twelve Step program, laced with tough love and blunt self-honesty. Why not a Twelve Step program for economists? God knows, we have done enough damage with our arrogant, drunken prescriptions. Here's how each and every economist can face up to their inner demons, and make their own small contribution to setting things right. ..."
From 2010: "They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)" https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.h... "But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists — like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor — have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. “There is so much inbredness in this profession,” says Ms. Reinhart. “They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.”"
Or from 2011: "Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal" by Moshe Adler https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7197448-economics-for-th... "Why do contemporary economists consider food subsidies in starving countries, rent control in rich cities, and health insurance everywhere "inefficient"? Why do they feel that corporate executives deserve no less than their multimillion-dollar "compensation" packages and workers no more than their meager wages? Here is a lively and accessible debunking of the two elements that make economics the "science" of the rich: the definition of what is efficient and the theory of how wages are determined. The first is used to justify the cruelest policies, the second grand larceny.Filled with lively examples-from food riots in Indonesia to eminent domain in Connecticut and everyone from Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham to Larry Summers-Economics for the Rest of Us shows how today's dominant economic theories evolved, how they explicitly favor the rich over the poor, and why they're not the only or best options. Written for anyone with an interest in understanding contemporary economic thinking-and why it is dead wrong-Economics for the Rest of Us offers a foundation for a fundamentally more just economic system."
Or harder hitting from a trial lawyer: http://conceptualguerilla.com/essays/essays-on-economics-and... "Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a “leisure class”. As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies – gods, the “great chain of being” etc. – are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new “rational” world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites. That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology."
Or from 1999: "The Market as God" by Harvey Cox (Harvard professor of religion): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-mar... "A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar. Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies."
See also: "The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier" by Richard G. Wilkinson
And: "The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
And: "The Price of Inequality" by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Another petition/manifesto by students from 2009: "The True Cost Economics Manifesto" https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-true-cost-economics-manif... "“We, the Undersigned, make this accusation: that you, the teachers of neoclassical economics and the students that you graduate, have perpetuated a gigantic fraud upon the world. You claim to work in a pure science of formula and law, but yours is a social science, with all the fragility and uncertainty that this entails. We accuse you of pretending to be what you are not. You hide in your offices, protected by your mathematical jargon, while in the real world, forests vanish, species perish and human lives are callously destroyed. We accuse you of gross negligence in the management of our planetary household. ..."
There is at least one other petition I saw from around then (though with softer words) mainly by economics professors and grad students -- can't find it at the moment.
Or to go way, way back, see Marshall Sahlins: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's -- in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times. ... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
Even in the 1980s when I was in college it was clear to many that much of economics was, essentially, am apologetic branch of mathematics with little connection to the real world. My own take on that from around 2008: https://pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#Some_com...
- I agree with this point, as I have a strong distaste for the premise the above poster used: "This is the way things have always been". Implying, why try to change them? Women regularly died in childbirth for thousands of years, but do we hear anyone complaining about knowledge of sterile fields and advances in modern medicine?
If anyone is looking for data-driven cases on the scale and negative consequences of the increasing divide between rich and poor, I've found some good resources in Robert McChesney's The Digital Disconnect, Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality, and probably most famously Thomas Piketty's 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First century which Gates himself even recommended, ironically enough. All these books come under criticism for supposed ideological undertones, but even skeptics generally respect the underlying economic data.
- My personal picks as I continue to try to understand global economic trends since the 1980's through the prism of the 2008-crash:
The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy by Yanis Varoufakis [1]
The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future By Stiglitz, Joseph E. [2]
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon [3]
1. https://www.amazon.com/Global-Minotaur-America-Economic-Cont...
2. https://www.amazon.com/Price-Inequality-Divided-Society-Enda...
3. https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/d...
0: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7170627-the-emperor-of-al...The Empreror of All Maladies [0] Guns Germs and Steel [1] The Price of Inequality [2] Inventing Money [3]1: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Steel
2: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13698866-the-price-of-ine...
3: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249231.Inventing_Money
