In a post on the Oxfam blog, Nick Galasso has suggested three books about income inequality. They are Branko Milanovic’s [amazon_link id=”1459608151″ target=”_blank” ]The Haves and the Have-Nots[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”1416588701″ target=”_blank” ]Winner-Take-All Politics[/amazon_link] by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and Chrystia Freedland’s [amazon_link id=”1846142520″ target=”_blank” ]Plutocrats[/amazon_link]. These are billed as summer reading.

[amazon_image id=”1846142520″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich[/amazon_image]

For further reading, I’d add an earlier book by Milanovic, [amazon_link id=”0691121109″ target=”_blank” ]Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality[/amazon_link]; Thorstein Veblen’s [amazon_link id=”0199552584″ target=”_blank” ]The Theory of the Leisure Class[/amazon_link] (albeit skimming the denser parts – he wasn’t a good writer); the papers by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty on the historical data; [amazon_link id=”0718197380″ target=”_blank” ]The Price of Inequality[/amazon_link] by Joseph Stiglitz; [amazon_link id=”0805078541″ target=”_blank” ]The Status Syndrome[/amazon_link] by Michael Marmot; and [amazon_link id=”0300089538″ target=”_blank” ]Mind the gap: hierarchies, health and human evolution[/amazon_link] by Richard Wilkinson (but not, for my money, The Spirit Level; I know it has been revised in response to critiques but I was irrevocably put off by the first edition).