The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change

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Summary: Understanding Income, Wealth, and Inequality in the US
Review: In his book, The The New Dollars and Dreams, Frank Levy provides a comprehensive and rigorous history of the distribution of income and wealth in the United States, focusing in detail on post WWII development. The book is readable without sacrificing depth, with appeal to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences alike.

Conservative readers and/or those with a neo-classical economic philosophy of life may find some of the author's assumptions, conclusions, and prescriptions for change off-putting. But it is not an ideological polemic. It presents an enormous amount of data and information along with its judgments, allowing the reader to contest the author's opinions.

Highlights of the book include: the gini coefficient measure of wealth and income inequality, the important distinctions between wealth and income, trends in both wealth and income inequality, how education and the service economy have interacted to affect the distribution of income (but not wealth), and the importance of the distinctions between among the experiences of African American men and women's, as well as African American and white women.

Immensely useful and enjoyable--a rare combination.