Resources

Want to learn more about our extremely unequal world — and help advance the struggle for a more equal future? You’ll find here a series of listings that can get you started.

Reports

Battered by the Storm: How the Safety Net is Failing Americans and How to Fix it, December 2009
Co-authored by The Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for Community Change, Jobs With Justice, Legal Momentum, Barbara Ehrenreich and Peter Edelman.

Inequality by the Numbers, November 2009
Produced by the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good.

Organizations

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: The Center regularly generates reports and analyses that relate the ongoing concentration of income and wealth in the United States to hard times for low- and middle-income American families.

Center for Corporate Policy: Corporations have become a key engine for driving inequality, and the Center zeroes in on several inequality-related issues, including the battle against outrageous executive compensation.

Citizens for Tax Justice: A public interest advocacy group has been battling tax giveaways to the rich for nearly three decades. Reports on the site detail how recent tax changes have helped create an ever more top-heavy society.

Inequality.org: An information center for journalists, teachers, policy makers, and citizens features a wealth of facts and insights.

Institute for Policy Studies: A veteran progressive think tank in Washington, D.C. has been publishing widely respected annual studies on executive excess since the early 1990s, and the Institute now hosts a new Program on Inequality and the Common Good.

Poverty & Race Research Action Council: A civil rights policy organization is connecting social scientists with activists to promote a research-based advocacy strategy on issues of structural racial and economic inequality.

Tax Policy Center: A Urban Institute and Brookings Institution project makes available detailed data on how changes in the tax law, both already enacted and proposed, impact taxpayers at the bottom, middle, and top of the economic ladder.

United for a Fair Economy: For over a dozen years now, United for a Fair Economy has been helping community, labor, and religious groups understand how inequality impacts us all. Among other services, the UFE site offers free downloadable inequality workshop materials.

Books


• Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? Jared Bernstein (Berrett-Koehler, 2008)
• The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. Stephen Greenhouse (Random House, 2008)
• This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation. Barbara Ehrenreich (Henry Holt & Company, 2008)
• The Wealth Inequality Reader. Preface by Jesse Jackson Jr. Chuck Collins, Adria Scharf, et al, editors. (Dollars & Sense, 2008)
• Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lies of the New Rich. Robert Frank (Crown, 2007)
• The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity. Robert Kuttner (Random House, 2007)
• Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in American and its Poisonous Consequences. James Lardner, editor (New Press, 2006)
• Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class. Robert H. Frank (University of California Press, 2006)
• The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. Dean Baker (CEPR, 2006). Full text available online.
• The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide. Meizhu Lui, Barbara Robles, Betsy Leondar-Wright, Rose Brewer, and Rebecca Adamson (New Press, 2006)
• Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity. Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel (The New Press, 2005)
• Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives. Sam Pizzigati (The Apex Press, 2004) . Full text available online.