How should we think about politics? We’ve seen a big increase in inequality, measured in various ways, and this reflects the fact that the top people, the more educated, high earners have become more skilled. It’s ironic, when the US has the best universities in the world. That will reduce their earnings and thus inequality. But it’s different when you’re talking about equality of opportunity. We offer this survey of important reads both classic and contemporary. I think they are absolute sine qua nons for prosperity. Based on the work of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, if you look from the 1950s up to the end of the 1970s, the share of total national income in the US earned by the richest 1% was about 10%. We don’t live in a zero-sum world – and there is a lot of prosperity-creating capability that many societies have exploited – but there are also some zero-sum aspects. This is a really wonderful book. For example, there was a point during the Second World War when Roosevelt wanted people to have 100 per cent income tax when they were earning over the equivalent of £200,000. What’s to blame are the institutions. John Sutter asked readers for reading suggestions on income inequality. These inclusive institutions don’t guarantee that everything is going to be equally distributed but will at least prevent the most egregious and unfair distribution of resources. One is that technology has become even more biased towards more skilled, higher earning workers than before. Tell us about Super Rich: The Rise of Inequality in Britain and the United States. This site has an archive of more than one thousand interviews, or five thousand book recommendations. At the root of social inequality in this country is something we’ve ignored for far too long: housing. Technology has favoured them, globalisation has favoured them, and inequality has increased for that reason. The first is a belief in elitism; people now believe, much more than they used to, that it is worth investing a lot of money in the education of a very small number of young people. We were talking about how the US has become more unequal and political power more unequally distributed. The book relates aspects of inequality to the features of educational systems, showing how policy choices impact on the life chances of children from different class backgrounds. What has happened to earnings inequality among lawyers or doctors or among production workers? But actually none of it is really as obvious as it appears. Where we live matters. 3 4 The Selfish Capitalist I often read books outside of the education sector to think about how we can support every student, no matter their background, to be successful in college, career and life. But if you want to understand the top inequality, why the top 0.1% – even more than what the 1% Occupy Wall Streeters are talking about – have been earning such huge amounts, then really you have to think about the social policy aspects of it and the politics of it. 2. In early chapters, we document how many parts of the world that are very prosperous today were relatively backward at the time Europeans arrived to colonise them. However, in countries that become very unequal beliefs form which underpin inequality and justify it, only not directly. OK, so let’s go on to the inequality article you’ve chosen, “Top Incomes in the Long-Run of History” by three European economists, Anthony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. For example, they emphasise that it’s very difficult to account for these figures with the standard labour supply, labour demand explanation that Goldin and Katz emphasise. As the world went into lockdown early in 2020, many of us without frontline jobs and lucky enough not to fall sick with Covid-19 found more time to read than usual. What I mean is that we have to make sure that the political institutions in the US have the same resilience that they showed at the turn of the century, during the Gilded Age. Historical Takes Books. What the paper shows is that concurrent with the increase in the college premium and inequality between a median worker and a worker at the bottom, there has been an even sharper increase in the share of the top 10% and top 1% in national income in the US, Canada, UK and so on. I’m definitely in that camp. The second is equality of opportunity, and the third is equality of economic outcome. It’s not a monocausal, simple story. Read It deals with major education movements in each time period, tracing how we got to where we are today. Will it be Occupy Wall Street? It would be a very inefficient society if we imposed equality of economic outcomes, because the engines that create prosperity do require individuals to have property rights, to have incentives, so that they put in effort, work hard and invest. And when that’s software, that’s going to create better innovations in software. Stuffed and Starved If you look at the 0.1%, it accounts for almost 8% of national income in the US, when in many countries it’s more like 1% or 2%. by George Irvin We are conditioned to think of factors such as culture and geography as so determining because we see them as immutable. That’s not going to work, and we really have to think about things like social policies, progressive taxation and the politics of it. Nonfiction books about class in the American education system. Discover the best Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Prejudice & Racism in Best Sellers. The book begins with a theoretical conceptualization for a comparative understanding of globalization, higher education, labour markets and inequality. Solidarity! Your first choice is The Race between Education and Technology, published by Harvard University Press. In this book, international anti-inequality campaigner Ben Phillips shows why winning the debate is not enough: we have to win the fight. Even Margaret Thatcher believed that her policies would reduce inequality: she set the target in 1985 that inequality would fall drastically by 2000. I never know whether to trust figures like that, when you don’t really know where they come from. You often hear people saying that social mobility is unlikely because the middle class produce children who are naturally cleverer. It also introduces readers to Chanel Miller, an extraordinary writer, one whose words have already changed our world. 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