Showing titles in Social Classes & Economic Disparity

Segregation by Design draws on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation. Starting in the early 20th century, cities have used their power of land use control to determine the location and availability of housing, amenities (such as parks), and negative land uses (such as garbage dumps). The result has been segregation - first within cities and more recently between them. 

In 1890s America Thorstein Veblen attacked a careless acceptance of prevailing social structures, identifying ancient roots for ‘pecuniary culture’ and ‘conspicuous consumption’–realities that promoted materialism and squashed fulfilment. In The Theory of the Leisure Class the worthy Engineer, creating essential products for all, is pitted against the predatory Businessman, exempt from grubby industrial toil and focussed on useless profits.

Italian shoes, a house in the hills, a gift for stretching the truth, and a petulant assistant to pick the scallions out of his Szechuan noodles - Hollywood producer Davis Mizlansky has it all. But he's about to lose it to the IRS unless he can pull off one more deal. A stellar cast performs this hilarious send-up of modern-day Hollywood.

As the labor market continues to exploit workers by offering precarious, low-paid, and temporary jobs, for some, duality offers much-needed flexibility and staves off poverty. This book illustrates contemporary accounts of individuals taking extraordinary risks to hold jobs in both sex industries and non-sex work employment. It also opens a dialogue about how sex industries are stratified in the UK in terms of race and culture against the backdrop of Brexit. Debunking stereotypes of sex workers, this book makes an invaluable contribution to discourses about work, society, and policy.

President Obama's goal is to create a two-class society: the poor and the super-rich. Decades of liberals - and even a few supposed "Republicans" - have helped push America toward this goal, and President Obama hopes to finish their work. Why? Because this two-class society cements the crony capitalism that feeds big government and keeps corrupt big shots like Obama and his friends in power, permanently enshrined as the ruling class. Meanwhile, it keeps everyone else hooked on the government like a drug that's impossible to quit.

Just six years after the Racial Reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, we are witnessing a full-scale assault on equality in America unparalleled since the overthrow of Reconstruction. Building on the urgency and clarity of his New York Times and Washington Post bestseller Brown Is the New White and his "spirited and persuasive" (Publishers Weekly) How We Win the Civil War, Steve Phillips now calls on the nation to go back on the offensive in the fight for racial justice.

A historically conscious manifesto calling for worker organizing in tech, led by Black and Latinx technologists What We Build with Power is an urgent call for organizing shared strategies in order to disrupt the tech industry and move toward a more economically inclusive and equitable workforce...

American monopolies dominate, control, and consume most of the energy of our entire economic system; they function the same way as cancer does in a body, and like cancer, they weaken our systems while threatening to crash the entire body economics. American monopolies have also seized massive political power and use it to maintain their obscene profits and CEO salaries while crushing small competitors.

The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America.

Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at Smith his mother came in second in a poetry contest judged by W. H. Auden -- to Sylvia Plath. For centuries, Wasps like his ancestors dominated American life. But then, in the '60s, their fortunes began to fall. As a young man, Friend noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics.

Pulitzer Prize-winning economic journalist Steven Pearlstein argues that our thirty year experiment in unfettered markets has undermined core values required to make capitalism and democracy work. Thirty years ago, “greed is good” and “maximizing shareholder value” became the new mantras...

Terence Lester was born into a two-parent household that later separated due to family conflict. In search of safety and stability, his mother moved him and his sister from place to place. Carrying the weight of that early trauma, Lester turned to gangs, became a juvenile delinquent, experienced homelessness, and at one point lived out of his car. He dropped out of high school. But Lester's story doesn't end there. He eventually returned to school, graduated as a fifth-year senior, and defied the odds by earning five degrees, including a PhD in public policy.

Africa’s Future Begins with a Shift in Mindset. In Generational Shift, Kenety S. Gee presents a bold and inspiring vision for a new era of African development—one rooted not in dependency, but in innovation, self-reliance, and empowered African leadership. Challenging outdated systems and generational cycles that have hindered progress, this powerful book explores how Africans—on the continent and across the African diaspora—can reimagine tradition, drive economic empowerment, and champion social justice to unlock a brighter future.

Peabody Award–winning journalist Michele Norris offers a transformative dialogue on race and identity in America, unearthed through her decade-long work at The Race Card Project. The prompt seemed simple: Race. Your Thoughts. Six Words. Please Send. The answers, though, have been challenging...

Many Americans, holding fast to the American Dream and the promise of equal opportunity, claim that social class doesn't matter. Yet the ways we talk and dress, our interactions with authority figures, the degree of trust we place in strangers, our religious beliefs, our achievements, our senses of morality and of ourselves all are marked by social class, a powerful factor affecting every domain of life.

For 30 years, Ranjeet Singh has worked in the city of London. He’s witnessed the corruption, lies, and deceit that is costing UK investors billions of pounds each year. From dodgy IPOS and EIS rackets to pump and dump scams and unregulated bonds. From boiler room fraud and penny share scandals to swindling IFAS and criminal fund managers. From CFD brokers conning cash to fake FX gurus destroying dreams.

Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Robert Wuthnow brings us into America's small towns, farms, and rural communities to paint a rich portrait of the moral order -the interactions, loyalties, obligations, and identities - underpinning this critical segment of the nation. Wuthnow demonstrates that to truly understand rural Americans' anger, their culture must be explored more fully. Moving beyond simplistic depictions of the residents of America's heartland, The Left Behind offers a clearer picture of how this important population will influence the nation's political future. 

Published to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Forbes 400, ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, the work of a team of prominent editors and business writers, goes behind the celebrated list to paint a vivid and revealing portrait of the wealthiest Americans of the past quarter century...

We are a nation founded on the ideals of coming together across differences to forge a common future. Yet over the past 50 years, our economy has been pulling us apart at unprecedented rates. By allowing top income earners and the wealthiest Americans to hoard wealth like almost never before, we belie what makes our country great. This is a threat to our wellbeing, our democracy, and our values.

Change for Good is a new system for making social change through business that reflects Paul’s experience over the last 35 years. One of the core principles of Change for Good is including people with lived experience of social problems in identifying promising solutions and collaborating to bring these solutions to life. This methodology can create impactful and sustainable social change in society in ways that aren’t possible when executives make decisions in their boardrooms that are intended to impact the lives of vulnerable people.