The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

Joseph E. Stiglitz

Jun 2012 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this eBook

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.

Ratings and reviews

This is a socialism propaganda writing. If your for giving thing to those that won't work hard to get ahead or plain lazy you will love this junk. If you think people are entitled to anything you will eat this up. If on the other hand you believe in freedom and taking control of your destiny and hate government telling every step to take this book sucks.

Occupy Wall Street, climate hawks, and progressive social change advocates would do well to drive The Price of Inequality viral as it clearly describes the root causes of the dystopia of now -- with, even worse to come -- and critical paths to a much more prosperous future.

If you're like Joel and Chaz below; if you believe nonsense about mandates on banks to lend to the unqualified or other rightwing fantasies, like the existence or viability of an unrestrained "free market", you will be disappointed. But if you lived through the last 30-40 years and are old enough to remember when the CEO of your company only made 40 X what you did, instead of 400X, and there was an actual middle class, you'll understand. Extreme wealth stratification is not accidental, natural or justified

About the author

Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize–winning economist and the best-selling author of People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent; Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti-Globalization in the Age of Trump; The Price of Inequality; and Freefall. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton, chief economist of the World Bank, named by Time as one of the 100 most influential individuals in the world, and now teaches at Columbia University and is chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute.