Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality That Limits Our Lives

by Sam Pizzigati

Should we care that wealth in the United States is unequally distributed — and getting more so every year? Should we worry that America's most wealthy, in just a generation, have more than doubled their share of the nation's wealth? Our nation's highest leaders certainly don't think so. They either ignore, or dismiss, the huge gaps in income and wealth that divide us. But these gaps, author Sam Pizzigati shows in his compelling new book, are undermining nearly every aspect of our lives, from our health to our happiness, from our professions to our pastimes, from our arts to our Earth. Greed and Good both reveals the horrific price we pay for tolerating inequality and dissects the case for greed, the old saws that apologists for inequality regularly trot out to justify the mammoth concentrations of wealth that tower all around us. These concentrations, Greed and Good argues, can and must be cut down to democratic size. And Greed and Good, in clear-headed and fascinating prose, even shows how.

684 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, has been writing about inequality in America since the early 1990s. A veteran labor journalist, Pizzigati has edited national publications for four different U.S. trade unions. He currently writes for the OtherWords media service and co-edits Inequality.org, the Institute for Policy Studies weekly on maldistributed income and wealth and its companion website. His articles and op-eds on inequality have appeared in publications ranging from the New York Times and USA Today to Le Monde Diplomatique and the Guardian.

Reviews

[Tommy Estlund · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fantastic book. The author clearly tackles the myths surrounding the arguments apologists for concentrated wealth use and then delineates the cost to our society as a whole.

The only issue I have with the book is that the author discusses the effects of inequality on us as a country, and then discusses the impact of our steep levels of inequality on the world, but when discussing the proposed solution (the ten-times rule, which I think is awesome) the author does not discuss the global ramifications, namely, how these changes would effect the global community, and how global response would impact our nation.

However, I would recommend ANYONE read at the very least the section on moving forward, and in particular the chapter that discusses the ten-times rule.

Fascinating read.

Love it.