Every economic system exists only to satisfy human wants, yet most systems fail to do so. Taking a keen look at the gap between goal and result, Stanley Lebergott appraises public policies relating to the U.S. distribution of income and wealth today.Part I shows that many programs have disappointed their proponents because certain basic assumptions were not understood. The author's new data suggest more realistic answers to much-debated questions: Are the rich getting richer? How much "upward mobility" exists? What approaches to poverty, starvation, and discrimination are practical today? In Part II, size distributions are derived for wealth in 1970, for income in 1900, and for white and non-white income for the period 1900-1970. These data include new estimates for key items in the standard of living since 1900, with detail on services that have dominated the "postindustrial" economy.Originally published in 1976.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: We’ve all heard that the American Dream is vanishing, and that the cause is rising income inequality. The rich are getting richer by rigging the system in their favor, leaving the rest of us to struggle just to keep our heads above water...read more

Product Description: A growing inequality in income and wealth marks modern capitalism, and it negatively affects nearly every aspect of our lives, especially those of the working class. It is and will continue to be the central issue of politics in almost every nation on earth...read more

Product Description: Revised, Updated Edition Runaway inequality is now America’s most critical economic fact of life. In 1970, the ratio of pay between the top 100 CEOs and the average worker was 45 to 1. Today it is a shocking 829 to one! During that time a new economic philosophy set in that cut taxes, deregulated finance, and trimmed social spending...read more

Product Description: Economic inequalities have been perhaps the most enduring problem facing African Americans since the civil rights movement, despite the attention they have received from activists. Although the civil rights movement dealt successfully with injustices like disenfranchisement and segregated public accommodations, economic disparities between blacks and whites remain sharp, and the wealth gap between the two groups has widened in the twenty-first century...read more

Product Description: The growing gap between the most affluent Americans and the rest of society is changing the country into one defined―more than almost any other developed nation―by exceptional inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity. This book reveals that an infrastructure of inequality, both open and hidden, obstructs the great majority in pursuing happiness, living healthy lives, and exercising basic rights...read more

Economics Today has long led the field in offering students and instructors a dynamic, application-rich approach to learning and teaching economics. With the introduction of the Study Edition, the textbook offers yet another option. This special edition features a set of Practice Tests brimming with numerical and graphing questions that hone students' problem-solving skills.As an instructor using the Study Edition, you can assign the perforated test pages as homework and then use the answer keys available at www.econtoday.com to simplify the grading process. Alternatively, you may choose to make the solutions available to students for self-testing.

As the United States continues its slow climb out of the Great Recession, it is important to focus on new directions to improve the standard of living in America. This book explores what is behind a faltering standard of living in the United States since the early 1980s and what can be done to restore it. The book is uniquely valuable in going beyond mainstream thinking about how to restore prosperity. Economics has traditionally equated economic growth (increases in per capita income) with improvements in quality of life and the standard of living. This book questions that assumption. The different chapters in the book show the standard of living as being more than income, to include many non-market aspects such as access to public goods (roads, clean air and water, schools, parks, and museums), intangible aspects of quality of life such as equity and a sense of community, and broadly based economic opportunities. This means that improving the standard of living is a multi-dimensional challenge rather than one of solely increasing aggregate demand, productivity, or GDP. This book embodies a pluralistic approach and draws on the expertise of a wide array of thinkers. The intended audience is for various courses offered in economics, sociology, political science, public policy programs, and in environmental and ecological studies.

This book deals with the social costs of markets from a heterodoxperspective.  It deals with the degrading of work, decline ofcommunity, and rising income inequality in the United States asmarkets and especially financial markets come to dominatesociety.  Of course, if there is an attempt to point out thesocial costs of markets, the response of mainstream economists isto silence the critics or even in Orwellian fashion redefine theircritiques so as to eliminate any negative comments aboutmarkets.  While critique is necessary, there also needs to bea constructive agenda, that is, the developing of an alternative,heterodox economic theory.  So overall the book presents acritique of the social costs markets and the beginning of aheterodox economic theory of how the capitalist market systemactually works.