"Price concludes with provocative proposals for aid policies that would expand the range of college and career choices for students - policies that would in fact support the role of higher education as a vehicle for individual opportunity and social change."--BOOK JACKET.

Indebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in the United States. Yet few have probed American cities’ dependence on municipal debt or how the terms of municipal finance structure racial privileges, entrench spatial neglect, elide democratic input, and distribute wealth and power. In this passionate and deeply researched book, Destin Jenkins shows in vivid detail how, beyond the borrowing decisions of American cities and beneath their quotidian infrastructure, there lurks a world of politics and finance that is rarely seen, let alone understood. Focusing on San Francisco, The Bonds of Inequality offers a singular view of the postwar city, one where the dynamics that drove its creation encompassed not only local politicians but also banks, credit rating firms, insurance companies, and the national municipal bond market. Moving between the local and the national, The Bonds of Inequality uncovers how racial inequalities in San Francisco were intrinsically tied to municipal finance arrangements and how these arrangements were central in determining the distribution of resources in the city. By homing in on financing and its imperatives, Jenkins boldly rewrites the history of modern American cities, revealing the hidden strings that bind debt and power, race and inequity, democracy and capitalism.

Inequality and poverty have returned with a vengeance in recent decades. To reduce them, we need fresh ideas that move beyond taxes on the wealthy. Anthony B. Atkinson offers ambitious new policies in technology, employment, social security, sharing of capital, and taxation, and he defends them against the common arguments and excuses for inaction.

Judith Blau's disturbing study presents strong evidence that our schools, assumed by many to be an equalizing force in U.S. society, are in fact racialized settings that reproduce white advantage - to the detriment of all students. Drawing on rich, longitudinal databases, Blau explores the values, activities, and educational experiences of a sample of young people born a decade or so after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was signed into law. She focuses on topics that are both important in students' lives and central in schooling: attitudes toward integrity and cheating, getting into trouble, interracial relations, learning, and going to college. Her remarkable findings challenge many assumptions long held by researchers and policymakers. Race in the Schools, combining an accessible style, sophisticated methodology, and clear policy relevance, is a seminal study of the pervasive consequences of race in the U.S. education system.

. . . provides an excellent example of economic analysis using atypical analytical approaches. . . the book is very accessible, especially to readers with some grounding in economics. Mathematical models and empirical evidence are appropriately used and the writing is superb. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students should be able to follow the analysis and will benefit from seeing the alternative analytics at work. Of course economists of all stripes will find something useful in this book as will anyone with a strong interest in understanding the current economic crisis. Richard V. Adkisson, The Social Science Journal For those who do not mind a stimulating read, the book by Christopher Brown, Inequality, Consumer Credit and the Saving Puzzle, is recommended. . . the book is exciting, tracing the causes for the uncommonly low savings rate in American households. . . this book is written in nearly colloquial language and easily understood. It is divided into eight chapters, each of which addresses one theme group, respectively. The author evaluates in detail literary sources, and also examines alternative approaches, but always returns to his line of thought. Relationships that he perceives as important are exemplified through small models. In addition to that, he always attempts to support the central thesis with statistics. In particular, to read those statistics is very exciting. Conclusion: a book definitely worth reading. Friedrich Thießen, Bankhistorisches Archiv Brown makes an important contribution to the field of consumer credit by presenting a broad view of the issues and problems associated with growing consumer credit habits, culture, and institutions. . . This book effectively uses a heterodox methodology, which will appeal to a wide audience of social scientists. Highly recommended. R.H. Scott, Choice Providing much needed context for current events like the sub-prime mortgage crisis, this timely book presents a vision of an economy evolved to greater dependence on consumer credit and analyzes the trade-offs and risks associated with it. While synthesizing the Keynesian theory of consumption with the Institutional theory of habit selection (brought up to date with new knowledge from evolutionary biology and neuroscience), this book represents an in-depth treatment of the macroeconomic dimensions of consumer credit and implications of recent financial innovations from a non-traditional economic approach. Some of the effects of consumer credit dependence include the potential for illiquidity in markets for debt-collateralized securities, sub-prime contagion, or the possibility of a Minsky-type debt deflation episode. The author also argues that a sharp increase in borrowing by US households over the past 20 years, aided by financial innovations such as the securitization of consumer loans and sub-prime lending, have lessened the harmful consequences of income inequality, and that the collapse of personal saving after 1993 is actually a gradual trend of consumer habits conforming to the imperatives of corporatism. The book s primary audience will be academic economists in sympathy with heterodox and pluralist approaches. It sets forth an institutional or top-down theory of household spending behavior that should be of interest to readers in fields such as sociology, consumer or family studies, psychology, or anthropology. Much of the book is technically accessible for non-economists and students.

Finance is an inescapable part of American life. From how one pursues an education, buys a home, runs a business, or saves for retirement, finance orders the lives of ordinary Americans. And as finance continues to expand, inequality soars. In Divested, Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely demonstrate why widening inequality cannot be understood without examining the rise of big finance. The growth of the financial sector has dramatically transformed the American economy by redistributing resources from workers and families into the hands of owners, executives, and financial professionals. The average American is now divested from a world driven by the maximization of financial profit. Lin and Neely provide systematic evidence to document how the ascendance of finance on Wall Street, Main Street, and among households is a fundamental cause of economic inequality. They argue that finance has reshaped the economy in three important ways. First, the financial sector extracts resources from the economy at large without providing economic benefits to those outside the financial services industry. Second, firms in other economic sectors have become increasingly involved in lending and investing, which weakens the demand for labor and the bargaining power of workers. And third, the escalating consumption of financial products by households shifts risks and uncertainties once shouldered by unions, corporations, and governments onto families. A clear, comprehensive, and convincing account of the forces driving economic inequality in America, Divested warns us that the most damaging consequence of the expanding financial system is not simply recurrent financial crises but a widening social divide between the have and have-nots.