The Price of Inequality

Description

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz explains why we are experiencing such destructively high levels of inequality - and why this is not inevitable. The social impact of inequality is now increasingly understood - higher crime, health problems and mental illness, lower educational achievements and life expectancy. But what are the causes of inequality, why is it growing so rapidly and what are its economic and political impacts? In this exceptional book Joseph Stiglitz gives the answers. He shows how, left to their own devices, markets are neither efficient nor stable and tend to accumulate money in the hands of the few rather than engender competition, producing slower growth and lower GDP. He also demonstrates how political institutions, far from countering these trends, often enhance them. Arguing that 'another world is possible', The Price of Inequality provides a powerful, vital critique of free-market ideas.

Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist at the World Bank until January 2000. He is currently University Professor of the Columbia Business School and Chair of the Management Board and Director of Graduate Summer Programs, Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 and is the best-selling author of Globalization and Its Discontents, The Roaring Nineties, Making Globalization Work, Freefall, The Price of Inequality, The Great Divide, and his latest, The Euro, all published by Penguin.

The single most comprehensive counterargument to both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican laissez-faire theories. While credible economists running the gamut from center right to center left describe our bleak present as the result of seemingly unstoppable developments--globalization and automation, a self-replicating establishment built on "meritocratic" competition, the debt-driven collapse of 2008--Stiglitz stands apart in his defiant rejection of such notions of inevitability. He seeks to shift the terms of the debate. --Thomas B. Edsall