In his best-selling Two Nations (LJ 3/15/92), political scientist Hacker examined the role of race in the social and economic life of America. In his latest work, he argues that an equally enormous financial division separates Americans. He explains why there are increasingly more individuals at the extremes of the income scale while the middle is contracting. Besides the income gap between blacks and whites, Hacker shows where immigrants stand on the income scale, and he assesses the financial disparities between the sexes. He also explores how other elementse.g., greed, talent, and educationare factored into the income gap equation. Hacker combines detailed data on individual incomes and wealth in the United States with an exceptional analysis of economic and social class divisions. His well-researched work will interest scholars and students as well as the general public. Recommended for academic and public libraries.Ali Abdulla, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, N.C.
Anecdotal audits of American assets and incomes that (like Wall Street's jest about economists laid end-to-end) never reaches a conclusion.
Drawing on scores of secondary sources, Hacker (Political Science/Queens College; Two Nations, 1992, etc.) offers a hit-or- miss canvas of what well-paid, or at least well-regarded, US citizens make for working at various trades and their net worths. Inter alia, he provides selective data on the earning power of doctors, lawyers, and corporate chiefs, plus a host of other high- profile callings, including coaches of big-time college teams, film stars, school teachers, sports professionals, university professors. Conspicuous by their absence, however, are dentists, entrepreneurs (who, the author breezily asserts, can pay themselves anything they want), fashion models, songwriters, and tax collectors. Not too surprisingly, given the temper of the times, the top officers of publicly held enterprises are singled out for special, somewhat snide attention, in which the link of handsome pay packages to a company's success is breezily dismissed. Courtesy of Forbes magazine, the author also includes a briefing on what it takes to qualify for a list of the wealthiest Americans. Covered as well in no great depth are such hot topics as: the widening gap between the incomes of those on the upper and lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder; the persistent disparity between the earnings of blacks and whites, men and women, and immigrants and native- born; and the author's calculations of what constitutes a living wage. All but ignored, by contrast, are the influences of credit, non-monetary motivations, and supply/demand forces on income.
An academic's discontinuous and vaguely discontented survey of the way the money goes in latter-day America.
