The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes in the Late 1990s

by Frank Levy and Frank S. Levy

Book Overview

Foreword by Nicholas Lemann "A brilliant book that both clarifies and explains the seemingly contradictory trends of a booming economy, wage stagnation, and growing income inequality." --Thomas B. Edsall, author, The New Politics of Inequalityand political reporter atThe Washington Post More than a decade ago, Frank Levy's classic Dollars and Dreams offered an incisive analysis of the dramatic changes then taking place in the American standard of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871545152
• ISBN13: 9780871545152
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
• Length: 263 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Understanding Income, Wealth, and Inequality in the US

In his book, The The New Dollars and Dreams, Frank Levy provides a comprehensive and rigorous history of the distribution of income and wealth in the United States, focusing in detail on post WWII development. The book is readable without sacrificing depth, with appeal to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences alike.Conservative readers and/or those with a neo-classical economic philosophy of life may find some of the author's assumptions, conclusions, and prescriptions for change off-putting. But it is not an ideological polemic. It presents an enormous amount of data and information along with its judgments, allowing the reader to contest the author's opinions.Highlights of the book include: the gini coefficient measure of wealth and income inequality, the important distinctions between wealth and income, trends in both wealth and income inequality, how education and the service economy have interacted to affect the distribution of income (but not wealth), and the importance of the distinctions between among the experiences of African American men and women's, as well as African American and white women.Immensely useful and enjoyable--a rare combination.