Choice, September, 2003
No scholar matches Firebaugh ... clearly-written, well-organized, and methodologically sound. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty collections.
Book Description
The surprising finding of this book is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, global income inequality is decreasing. Critics of globalization and others maintain that the spread of consumer capitalism is dramatically polarizing the worldwide distribution of income. But as the demographer Glenn Firebaugh carefully shows, income inequality for the world peaked in the late twentieth century and is now heading downward because of declining income inequality across nations. Furthermore, as income inequality declines across nations, it is rising within nations (though not as rapidly as it is declining across nations). Firebaugh claims that this historic transition represents a new geography of global income inequality in the twenty-first century.
This book documents the new geography, describes its causes, and explains why other analysts have missed one of the defining features of our era�a transition in inequality that is reducing the importance of where a person is born in determining his or her future well-being.
Book Info
Text discusses global income inequality as the uneven distribution of economic activity and welfare worldwide. The author compares this to a new geography of global inequality, where income inequality declines across nations and rises within nations. Includes references, index, charts and graphs. DLC: Income distribution.
From the Publisher
"This work is likely to become a classic in the study of inequality. It is particularly important because in assuring the reader that the research is grounded in sound methodological scholarship, Firebaugh does not lose sight of the importance of the question he is addressing. His book is a powerful stimulus for further research in this and related fields; future research will have to address Firebaugh's argument before making any additional claims about the state of world income inequality." -- Lisa Keister, author of WEALTH IN AMERICA
About the Author
Glenn Firebaugh is Professor of Sociology and Demography, Head of the Department of Sociology, and Senior Scientist at the Population Research Institute, Pennsylvania State University. From 1997 to 2000 he served as Editor of the AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW. He was a quantitative methods fellow at Indiana University, and has taught at the ISR Summer Institute, University of Michigan, as well as at Vanderbilt and Penn State. His article "Empirics of world income inequality" (AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, June, 1999) won the best-article prize from the Center for the Study of Inequality, Cornell University.
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