January
2, 2006
Choice magazine, the American
Library Association book review journal
for research and professional
collections, has placed Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming
the Inequality that Limits Our Lives on its annual list of “Outstanding
Academic Titles.” This honor, announced in the Choice January 2006 issue,
went to less than 3 percent of the titles submitted to Choice over
the past year.
“Outstanding Academic Titles are truly the 'best of the
best,'” notes Choice editor Irving Rockwood. “As always,
only a select group of publishers and authors are represented on
such a list.”
Greed
and Good, by labor journalist Sam Pizzigati,
takes readers on an eye-opening tour of nearly every aspect
of
modern
American
life.
Our nation’s ever-widening
gaps between the wealthy and everyone else, Pizzigati shows,
are squeezing pride out of our professions, pleasure out of our
pastimes,
even years out of our lives.
This
widening inequality, in return, offers us nothing significant
of value. Greed and Good carefully dissects the
old saws that apologists for inequality regularly trot out
to justify the gaps that divide us.
“This extraordinary book begins
with a detailed demolition of the trickle-down case for inequality,” the
original Choice book review of Greed and Good noted
last March.
“Pizzigati, a labor economist, also makes the case that
vast accumulations of wealth neither create effective incentives
to work harder
nor ensure that the appropriate level of savings will be forthcoming.”
The enormous economic gap between America's most affluent and
everyone else, Greed and Good counsels, not only
should be narrowed, but can
be.
And
just how? Greed and Good explores the most promising
options for creating a less unequal America, then offers
a practical political guide for moving forward on the boldest
option of all, a “maximum wage,” a national ceiling
on annual individual income that would rise if and only if
the minimum wage rose first. “If
all men and women are indeed created equal,” as Greed
and Good makes so clear, “then
any society that winks at the monstrously large fortunes
that make some people decidedly more equal than others is
asking
for trouble.”
The complete contents of Greed and Good, as published by the nonprofit
Apex Press, can now be perused online.
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