Want to learn more about our extremely unequal world–and help advance the struggle for a more equal future? Here is a series of listings that can get you started.
Basic Web Portals
Several websites focus directly on the gap between the rich and everyone else. They feature everything from stats on our grand divide to the latest on anti-inequality action opportunities.
How unequal are we? Why does extreme inequality matter so much? Where can activists find tools for narrowing that inequality? This site, just created by the Working Group on Extreme Inequality, answers these questions and much more.
This information center for journalists, teachers, policy-makers and citizens features a wealth of facts and insights.
For more than a dozen years United for a Fair Economy has been helping community, labor and religious groups understand how inequality impacts us all. This site offers free inequality workshop materials and dissects the nation’s growing racial wealth divide.
Extreme Inequality News Updates
This free online weekly covers a wide swath of economic, political and cultural territory, from CEO pay battles and lifestyles of the rich and shameless to the latest research on how staggering income and wealth divides are impacting our health and our happiness. You can sign up to receive Too Much as a weekly e-mail.
Organizations
One popular section of the AFL-CIO site, Executive PayWatch, lets you see how your take-home compares with what top corporate execs are making–and shares ideas on what you what can do to fight back for common sense on compensation.
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.
Corporations have become a key engine for driving inequality, and the Center for Corporate Policy zeroes in on several inequality-related issues, including the battle against outrageous executive compensation.
Popular
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This 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.
A network for ideas and action, this New York-based think tank spotlights the work of scholars and activists who are exploring how public policies comfort the comfortable at the expense of average American families.
Offering research for broadly shared prosperity, EPI has been closely and carefully tracking the upward redistribution of income and wealth in the United States for more than two decades.
This veteran progressive think tank in Washington has been publishing widely respected annual studies on executive excess since the early 1990s, and the institute now hosts a program on Inequality and the Common Good.
Poverty & Race Research Action Council
This 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.
This Urban Institute and Brookings Institution project makes available detailed data on how changes in tax law, both enacted and proposed, impact taxpayers at all levels of the economic ladder.
Online Organizing Against Inequality
Behind the Buyouts: Inside the World of Private Equity
The Service Employees International Union launched this site to rally support for efforts to curb the virtually unregulated private-equity industry, a prime generator of contemporary inequality.
Apologists for inequality like to deny that class exists in the United States. Class Action outfits individuals, organizations and institutions with the tools and resources they can use to work on eliminating classism.
Health activists created this site to help explain how our growing economic divide constitutes our greatest health hazard. The forum organizes discussions and workshops, develops curriculums and provides speakers.
This national network of business people, investors and affluent Americans concerned about deepening economic inequality works primarily on tax fairness and corporate responsibility.
This spirited site hosted by Brave New Films mixes innovative short videos on the superrich with facts about inequality and action ideas for spreading the word.
New and Recent Books
This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich (Henry Holt & Company, 2008)
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)
The Wealth Inequality Reader, Chuck Collins, Adria Scharf et al., editors, with preface by Jesse Jackson Jr. (Dollars & Sense, 2008)
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill), David Cay Johnston (Portfolio, 2007)
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 America and its Poisonous Consequences, James Lardner, editor, with foreword by Bill Moyers (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.
For a broader inequality bibliography, including classic titles, please click to the Working Group on Extreme Inequality site.
