San Antonio College Library

"We are used to thinking about inequality within countries - about rich Americans versus poor Americans, for instance. But what about inequality between all citizens of the world? Worlds Apart addresses just how to measure global inequality among individuals, and shows that inequality is shaped by complex forces often working in different directions. Branko Milanovic, a top World Bank economist, analyzes income distribution worldwide using, for the...

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault...

The system is capitalism, and Yates (associate editor, Monthly Review) doesn't just name it, he roundly condemns it and the neoclassical economists that provide its ideological justifications. Essentially a Marxist primer, though not an unsophisticated one, his text lays out the general workings of today's global capitalist economy, shines a spotlight on inequality it naturally engenders and the conditions of the working classes, critiques the shibboleths...

Demonstrates that finance is the driveshaft that links inequality to economic instability.

As events highlight deep divisions in attitudes between America and Europe, this is a very timely study of different approaches to the problems of domestic inequality and poverty. Based on careful and systematic analysis of national data, the authors describe just how different the two continents are in the level of their State engagement in the redistribution of income. They go through various possible economic explanations for the difference, including...

"Globalization is characterized by persistent poverty and growing inequality. Conventional wisdom has it that this global poverty is residual: as globalization deepens, the poor will be lifted out of destitution. The policies of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO echo this belief and push developing countries ever deeper into the global economy." "Globalization, Poverty and Inequality provides an alternative viewpoint. It argues that for many - particularly...

"Free enterprise is off the leash and chasing new opportunities for profit making across the globe. After a turbulent century of unprecedented social and technological change, Capitalism has emerged as the dominant ideology and model for economic growth in the richest, most developed countries. But only thirty years ago economic growth was faltering, inflation rising and the Left were arguing for greater state intervention in industry. How did this...

"International trade accounts for only a small share of growing income inequality and labor-market displacement in the United States. Lawrence deconstructs the gap in real blue-collar wages and labor productivity growth between 1981 and 2006 and estimates how much higher these wages might have been had income growth been distributed proportionately and how much of the gap is due to measurement and technical factors. While increased trade with developing...

"Harvard economist Richard B. Freeman argues that it is now time to stop analyzing the causes and consequences of inequality and concentrate on doing something about it. He also offers real solutions: Raise the income of the working class, reinvest in cities, and reenergize democratic institutions through the encouragement of local citizen organizations." "Responding essays by distinguished scholars and activists - James Tobin, Heidi Hartmann, Michael...

"Between 1800 and 2000 life expectancy at birth rose from about thirty years to a global average of sixty-seven years, and to more than seventy-five years in favored countries. This dramatic change, called the health transition, is characterized by a transition in how long people expected to live and in how they expected to die. The most common age at death jumped from infancy to old age. Most people lived to know their children as adults, and most...