The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change [Paperback]

Frank Levy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0871545152 | ISBN-13: 978-0871545152 | Publication Date: January 1999

The New Dollars and Dreams explores today's puzzling economic landscape, in which low unemployment goes hand in hand with sluggish wage growth and high income inequality. This book offers an invaluable guide to the sweeping economic, social, and political changes that have remade life in the United States over the past twenty-five years. Levy tells a fascinating and insightful story about what happened to American Incomes and jobs. His plot resists the simple truths of everyday journalism, and explains the economic and political twists and turns that have shaped the current American economy - including the oil and food price inflations of the 1970s, the market deregulations and corporate downsizing of the 1980s, the emergence of women as sole breadwinners in many families, the migration of jobs to the suburbs, and the computerization of work. By making sense of these complex trends, The New Dollars and Dreams offers crucial insights into why, despite a thriving economy, many Americans no longer feel secure in their financial futures.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Read The New Dollars and Dreams for its crystal clear analysis of where we are and where we have been. Take the jeremiad about where we are going with a grain or two of salt." -- Sylvia Nasar, The Milken Institute Review, First Quarter, 1999

"[Levy] is a rare cross between an economist and a journalist - economist because he's among the leading experts in the changing distribution of income in America; journalist because for twenty years he has been committed to seeing this difficult topic whole." -- David Warsh, The Boston Globe, February 14, 1999

Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871545152
• ISBN-13: 978-0871545152
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #949,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding Income, Wealth, and Inequality in the US, February 20, 2001

By 

Michael C. Beers "mikebeers" (West Newton, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change (Paperback)

In his book, The The New Dollars and Dreams, Frank Levy provides a comprehensive and rigorous history of the distribution of income and wealth in the United States, focusing in detail on post WWII development. The book is readable without sacrificing depth, with appeal to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences alike.

Conservative readers and/or those with a neo-classical economic philosophy of life may find some of the author's assumptions, conclusions, and prescriptions for change off-putting. But it is not an ideological polemic. It presents an enormous amount of data and information along with its judgments, allowing the reader to contest the author's opinions.

Highlights of the book include: the gini coefficient measure of wealth and income inequality, the important distinctions between wealth and income, trends in both wealth and income inequality, how education and the service economy have interacted to affect the distribution of income (but not wealth), and the importance of the distinctions between among the experiences of African American men and women's, as well as African American and white women.

Immensely useful and enjoyable--a rare combination.