Longtime American.com readers will know that the inequality debate has been of particular interest to us, since it is so often marked by a lack of clarity and an abundance of bad faith. Will Wilkinson has just released a major paper on the topic. If you are someone who genuinely cares about the debate over inequality and getting the facts and policy right, it merits your attention. It’s best considered in conjunction with some other sources, in particular the surprising results in this book on the increase in leisure inequality (in which the authors Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst find that less educated Americans have seen their leisure time increase and better educated Americans have seen it decrease). Another important work is the book by Christian Broda and David Weinstein, Prices, Poverty and Inequality. (Arnold Kling and I dug into some of the inequality data in an American.com essay you can find here.)
