Money: Who Has How Much and Why

by Andrew Hacker

Using statistics, a political scientist seeks to explain why some Americans have money and others do not, asking such questions as "How does racial bias contribute to income disparities between whites and blacks?" and assessing the link of wealth to values and expectations. 125,000 first printing. Tour.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Finance

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1997

About the author

Andrew Hacker is an American political scientist and public intellectual.
He is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Queens College in New York. He did his undergraduate work at Amherst College. This was followed by graduate work at Oxford University, University of Michigan, and Princeton University where he received his PhD degree.

Hacker taught at Cornell before taking his current position at Queens.
His most recent book, Higher Education? was written in collaboration with Claudia Dreifus, his domestic partner. Professor Hacker is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Reviews

[Haplea · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was published in 1997 (I got it from a garage sale); therefore its economic information should be quite old by now. But its overall picture is much the same today, only more extreme, with the top 5% becoming even wealthier and the rest of the society stagnating or getting less and less. In its radiography of the American society the author shows surprising disparities in salaries within the same profession (among practicing physicians, lawyers, professors, etc.), within employees based on gender, race, education, geography, within immigrants of different ethnicities, etc., and its dry, neutral and impartial analysis shows the reasons why it is so: economic factors, people or corporation choices, board-of-directors politics, globalization, technologic evolution, etc. He also shows the future evolution of society with a brilliance confirmed sixteen years later by the today reality. What makes his book easy to read and enjoyable is that he uses the numbers of his statistics in a crisp, non-boring way, concise and devoid of unnecessary details or any background noise. What is surprising for a reader like me is that the vast majority of Americans are supporters of the inequality of wealth where 1% own more than 40% of the social pie, and how he shows that even the destitute poor of the society reject a more equitable repartition of income to lift them from poverty. Unlike China or some others countries in Europe, for American mentality extreme inequality is not, and will be not in the future a problem worth mentioning, it is part of the American utopian dream "from rags to riches".

The book is rich in information and fascinating aspects of how the American pie is sliced. In conclusion, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a better understanding of America, its society and its future, a kind of writing a detached and perspicacious observer like Alexis de Tocqueville would have found in the distribution of incomes nowadays.