San Antonio College Library

We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.

In this book, two distinguished economists draw attention to an important and disturbing new trend that has dramatically transformed our economy in the last two decades: the spread of "winner-take-all" markets, where more and more people compete for ever fewer and bigger prizes. Such markets, where tiny differences in performance translate into huge differences in reward, have long been the hallmark of the performing arts and professional sports,...