by Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, Martin Sanchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, Kim Voss
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Product Description
As debate rages over the widening and destructive gap between the rich and the rest of Americans, Claude Fischer and his colleagues present a comprehensive new treatment of inequality in America. They challenge arguments that expanding inequality is the natural, perhaps necessary, accompaniment of economic growth. They refute the claims of the incendiary bestseller The Bell Curve (1994) through a clear, rigorous re-analysis of the very data its authors, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, used to contend that inherited differences in intelligence explain inequality. Inequality by Design offers a powerful alternative explanation, stressing that economic fortune depends more on social circumstances than on IQ, which is itself a product of society. More critical yet, patterns of inequality must be explained by looking beyond the attributes of individuals to the structure of society. Social policies set the "rules of the game" within which individual abilities and efforts matter. And recent policies have, on the whole, widened the gap between the rich and the rest of Americans since the 1970s. Not only does the wealth of individuals' parents shape their chances for a good life, so do national policies ranging from labor laws to investments in education to tax deductions. The authors explore the ways that America--the most economically unequal society in the industrialized world--unevenly distributes rewards through regulation of the market, taxes, and government spending. It attacks the myth that inequality fosters economic growth, that reducing economic inequality requires enormous welfare expenditures, and that there is little we can do to alter the extent of inequality. It also attacks the injurious myth of innate racial inequality, presenting powerful evidence that racial differences in achievement are the consequences, not the causes, of social inequality. By refusing to blame inequality on an unchangeable human nature and an inexorable market--an excuse that leads to resignation and passivity--Inequality by Design shows how we can advance policies that widen opportunity for all.
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Average Customer Review:
39 of 121 people found the following review helpful:
 Egalitarian Fantasy, 2000-01-19
This book certainly doesn't live up to its title, and is propelled mostly by the author's egalitarian fantasies, rather than the objective science presented in the Bell Curve.
20 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
 Easy-to-read, yet academic, critique of The Bell Curve, 1999-08-01
The numerous authors of this tome do a fine job in their criticism of Herrnstein and Murray. They discuss where those authors were correct, where they twisted stastics to meet their own goals, where they made false assumptions and where they committed bad science. This book doesn't get much into the genetic end of things, but rather discusses other causes of inequality and the flaws in the research of The Bell Curve. Recommended for anyone who wants a serious, scholarly, critique of pop science.
26 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
 An excellent, thorough, accessible critique of The Bell Curv, 1996-12-03
Fischer et al. launch a reasoned yet devastating critique on
methodological grounds of Herrnstein & Murray's infamous
_The Bell Curve._ The first half of the book details technical
errors and ommissions from TBC, offering three distinct
arguments against Herrnstein & Murray's basic claims, all
using the same data they used in _The Bell Curve._ Then
the second half of the book offers a substantive proposal
for understanding income and wealth inequality in the United
States, rooted in the same data Herrnstein & Murray used.
Highly recommended.
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