Social Classes & Economic Disparity

Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale....

These Are the Plunderers traces the thirty-year history of corporate takeovers in America and private equity’s increasing dominance....

This audiobook contains all 3 volumes of Capital, as well as Marx and Engel's most renowned work, The Communist Manifesto....

Somebodies and Nobodies introduces rank-based discrimination - or "rankism" - a form of injustice that everyone knows, but no one sees....

Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history....

Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? Find out....

On the Clock explores the lengths that half of Americans will go to in order to make a living, offering not only a better understanding of the modern workplace, but also surprising solutions to make work more humane for millions of Americans....

Once Were Warriors is Alan Duff's harrowing vision of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after the English conquest....

From Malcolm Gladwell’s hit podcast Revisionist History comes a compendium about one of his greatest obsessions: education....

The dramatic story of an improbable gang of self-proclaimed “degenerates” who made WallStreetBets into a cultural movement that moved from the fringes of the internet to the center of Wall Street, upending the global financial markets....

When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019, he called it an “unflinching look at America’s class divide…and a reminder of the dignity of all work.”

The leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society "the aspirational class"....

In this boldly drawn portrait of 18th-century England, Roy Porter defines a nation from its princes to its paupers....

If you don’t understand communist revolutions, you aren’t ready for what’s coming. The old rules are over. The old order is over. Accusations are evidence. Activism means bigotry and hate. Criminals are allowed to roam free. Citizens are locked up.

Progress and Poverty by Henry George explores the paradox of increasing inequality in periods of economic growth. George proposes that land...

The New York Times’s Global Economics Correspondent masterfully reveals how billionaires’ systematic plunder of the world—brazenly accelerated during the pandemic—has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy....

A profound and provocative examination of America in crisis, where unemployment, deindustrialization, and a bitter hopelessness and malaise have resulted in an epidemic of diseases of despair - drug abuse, suicide, xenophobia, and a culture of sadism and hate....

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work....

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live....

As Reeves shows, the growing separation between the upper middle class and everyone else can be seen in family structure, neighborhoods, attitudes, and lifestyle....

What are the lives of America's richest families really like? Their nannies see it all . . .

For decades, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism....

Living a Committed Life demonstrates the power of dedication that goes beyond the self and teaches how to live a committed life that enables you to draw on resources and capacities from your most authentic self....

Find out how to uncover the hidden talents, assets, and abilities in your neighborhood and bring them together to create a vibrant and joyful community....

In her first book since the widely acclaimed Strangers in Their Own Land, National Book Award finalist and best-selling author Arlie Russell Hochschild now ventures to Appalachia, uncovering the "pride paradox" that has given the right's appeals such resonance.

Poverty is big business in America. The federal government spends about $900 billion a year on programs that directly or disproportionately impact poor Americans, including antipoverty programs. States and local governments spend tens of billions more. Ironically, these enormous sums fuel the "corporate poverty complex," a vast web of hidden industries and entrenched private-sector interests that profit from the bureaucracies regulating the lives of the poor.

Elite networks are informal social networks between politicians in power and top executives of politically connected firms where personal ties and long-term interactions build trust and loyalty between involved actors. Both groups draw benefits from these interactions; politicians stay in power, and corporate executives extract rents for their firms. Firms reward connected executives with higher salaries thus widening the dispersion of earnings in society. In Elite Networks, Vuk Vukovic offers a different perspective on the long-run origins of inequality.

Bankruptcy is the busiest federal court in America. In theory, bankruptcy in America exists to cancel or restructure debts for people and companies that have way too many—a safety valve designed to provide a mechanism for restarting lives and businesses when things go wrong financially. Legal scholar Melissa B. Jacoby shows how bankruptcy has also become an escape hatch for powerful individuals, corporations, and governments, contributing in unseen and poorly understood ways to race, gender, and class inequality in America.

Since the earliest days of the pandemic, care work has been thrust into the national spotlight. The notion of care seems simple enough. Care is about nurturing, feeding, nursing, assisting, and loving human beings. It is "the work that makes all other work possible." But as historian Premilla Nadasen argues, we have only begun to understand the massive role it plays in our lives and our economy.

Historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization—what Frederick Douglass called plunder—through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder.