Short description:

This book asks leading scholars to debate the causes of inequality, whether we have an obligation to help the poor, and the types of reforms that are most likely to eliminate or reduce inequality.

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Long description:

Income inequality is an increasingly pressing issue in the United States and around the world. This book explores five critical issues to introduce some of the key moral and empirical questions about income, gender, and racial inequality:

Do we have a moral obligation to eliminate poverty?

Is inequality a necessary evil that's the best way available to motivate economic action and increase total outpt?

Can we retain a meaningful democracy even when extreme inequality allows the rich to purchase political privilege?

Is the recent stalling out of long-term declines in gender inequality a historic reversal that presages a new gender order?

How are racial and ethnic inequalities likely to evolve as minority populations grow ever larger, as intermarriage increases, and as new forms of immigration unfold?

Leading public intellectuals debate these questions in a no-holds-barred exploration of our New Gilded Age.

"Here is another strong, valuable, and timely addition to the 'Studies in Social Inequality' series, offering provocative arguments that will engage a wide audience of readers. Experts whose minds have been in the compelling clutch of stratification questions, attentive to scholarship surrounding class, race, and gender inequalities, will find in the book's five debates such an effective mixture of disciplinary voices that a refreshing review of their own assumptions and perspectives is nearly guaranteed. [T]his book invites a more nuanced and discerning reflection, low on rhetoric and high on reasoning. . . Highly recommended."?R. Zingraff, Choice

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