The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It - Tapa blanda

Críticas

The Great Divergenceis a welcome antidote.... I particularly recommend Noah's list of solutions.... his book is both much needed and a delight to read. (Andrew Hacker New York Review of Books)

Timothy Noah has written a graceful book on income inequality in America, based on his prize-winning 2011 series for Slate. AndThe Great Divergenceis well-timed: it emerges just as inequality is being transformed, via crisis and stress, from an academic backwater into a leading issue of the age ... In short, this is a valuable book. (James K. Galbraith Salon.com)

So you're busy and stressed andhave time to read just one book on America's faultline crisis of widening inequality. This is the one. ... A must read. (Ron Suskind, author of Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President)

This book is profoundly fascinating and important. The growth of income equality over the past three decades has caused a contentious partisan debate based more on ideology than fact. Timothy Noah provides a clear, dispassionate look at what has (and has not) caused this trend and what we can do about it. Everyone who cares about the future of America's middle class should read it. (Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin and President of the Aspen Institute)

This is the book the 99 percent has been waiting for. Crisply lucid and brilliantly argued,The Great Divergence manages to entertain at the same time that it explains. Best of all, Noah offers some strikingly sensible steps to undo the economic polarization that is tearing America apart. (Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed; Bait and Switch; and Bright-Sided)

Reseña del editor

For the past three decades, America has steadily become a nation of haves and have-nots. Our incomes are increasingly drastically unequal: the top 1% of Americans collect almost 20% of the nation's income-more than double their share in 1973. We have less equality of income than Venezuela, Kenya, or Yemen.

What economics Nobelist Paul Krugman terms "the Great Divergence" has until now been treated as little more than a talking point, a club to be wielded in ideological battles. But it may be the most important change in this country during our lifetimes-a sharp, fundamental shift in the character of American society, and not at all for the better.

The income gap has been blamed on everything from computers to immigration, but its causes and consequences call for a patient, non-partisan exploration. In The Great Divergence, Timothy Noah delivers this urgently needed inquiry, ignoring political rhetoric and drawing on the best work of contemporary researchers to peer beyond conventional wisdom. Noah explains not only how the Great Divergence has come about, but why it threatens American democracy-and most important, how we can begin to reverse it.

The Great Divergence is poised to be one of the most talked-about books of 2012, a jump-start to the national conversation about what kind of society we aspire to be in the 21st century: a land of equality, or a city on a hill-with a slum at the bottom.