The Age of Inequality

The stories behind the inequality crisis—a forty-year investigation by In These Times

With heart-wrenching reporting and incisive analysis, In These Times magazine has charted a staggering rise in inequality and the fall of the American middle class. Here, in a selection from four decades of articles by investigative reporters and progressive thinkers, is the story of our age. It is a tale of shockingly successful corporate takeovers stretching from Reagan to Trump, but also of brave attempts to turn the tide, from the Seattle global justice protests to Occupy to the Fight for 15.

Featuring contributions from Michelle Chen, Noam Chomsky, Tom Geoghegan, Juan González, David Moberg, Salim Muwakkil, Ralph Nader, Frances Fox Piven, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Slavoj Žižek, and many others, The Age of Inequality is the definitive account of a defining issue of our time.“As In These Times has documented for the past forty years, the great issue of our time is our nation’s movement toward oligarchy. We have a grotesque level of income and wealth inequality and a political system that is being bought and sold. We must make it clear that the greed of the 1 percent, corporate america, and wall street cannot continue. We must stand together and say ‘enough is enough.’”
—Bernie Sanders

“To get out of the current political and economic hole, we need to understand how we ended up here. For decades, In These Times has been marshaling some of our finest minds to tackle this vital question, and here are the illuminating results of that investigation.”
—Naomi Klein

“If we can’t address the gross unfairness that’s come to mark our economic life, we probably can’t address our other problems either. These are some of the planet’s sharpest minds, and what they say must be heard.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

“Compiles chronologically arranged excerpts from the Chicago-based publication’s coverage of labor and the economy from its 1976 launch through the dawn of the Trump era. The result is a sweeping chronicle of the slow-motion coup by which the billionaire class seized all the levers of power in our erstwhile democracy and used them to siphon wealth upward from ordinary workers to the corporate elite.”
—Danny Duncan Collum, SojournersJeremy Gantz is a contributing editor with In These Times. He lives in Chicago.