Showing titles in Social Classes & Economic Disparity

Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war. The Way That Leads Among...

In this monumental book by one of the Church’s greatest contemporary defenders, Bill Donohue explains how the ruling class is systematically undermining the virtues that have built Western civilization and producing a “moral holocaust” that the traditional family cannot withstand.

La vida cotidiana atravesada por la clase está en constante remiendo. Los rotos son las personas de clase obrera, pero también los constantes destrozos de una existencia popular; las fracturas de una vida hostil, rota, como una kelly al final del turno. Roto como el ánimo de quien pierde dos horas cada día en el transporte público o en la sala de espera de un ambulatorio, sin esperanza de mejora; sin futuro. Esta obra es una visión personal, íntima y subjetiva de cómo el origen social influye en la vida de la clase trabajadora.

The United States was founded on the principle of equal opportunity for all, and this ethos continues to inform the nation's collective identity. In reality, however, absolute equality is elusive. The gap between rich and poor has widened in recent decades, and the United States has the highest level of economic inequality of any developed country. Social class and other differences in status reverberate throughout American life, and prejudice based on another's perceived status persists among individuals and groups.

Segregation by Design draws on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation. Starting in the early 20th century, cities have used their power of land use control to determine the location and availability of housing, amenities (such as parks), and negative land uses (such as garbage dumps). The result has been segregation - first within cities and more recently between them.

In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished.

Since the Great Recession, most Americans' standard of living has stagnated or declined. Economic inequality is at historic highs. But inequality's impact differs by race; African Americans' net wealth is just a 10th that of White Americans, and over recent decades, White families have accumulated wealth at three times the rate of Black families. In our increasingly diverse nation, sociologist Thomas M. Shapiro argues, wealth disparities must be understood in tandem with racial inequities - a dangerous combination he terms "toxic inequality".

A captivating memoir about tutoring for Manhattan’s elite, revealing how a life of extreme wealth both helps and harms the children of the one percent. Ben orders daily room service while living in a five-star hotel. Olivia collects luxury brand sneakers worn by celebrities. Dakota jets off to...

The publication in 1848 of The Communist Manifesto came at a time when industrialization was reaching its peak, and signs of the cost to the working class blatant; the Revolutions of 1848 were just getting under way. Marx and Engels shared the belief that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" and this notion formed a central part of the manifesto they crafted together. They believed that industrialization was simply a new form of struggle among the classes - the price paid by the lower class still high.

This classic text addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. With the original 1987 publication of Ain’t No Makin’ It Jay MacLeod brought us to the Clarendon Heights housing project where we met the "Brothers" and the "Hallway Hangers". Their story of poverty, race, and defeatism moved listeners and challenged ethnic stereotypes.

Terence Lester was born into a two-parent household that later separated due to family conflict. In search of safety and stability, his mother moved him and his sister from place to place. Carrying the weight of that early trauma, Lester turned to gangs, became a juvenile delinquent, experienced homelessness, and at one point lived out of his car. He dropped out of high school. But Lester's story doesn't end there. He eventually returned to school, graduated as a fifth-year senior, and defied the odds by earning five degrees, including a PhD in public policy.

Grace Blakeley erfindet Kapitalismuskritik neu. Theoretisch fundiert, erfrischend klug und mit umfassender Recherche zeigt sie, dass kapitalistische Strukturen Freiheitnicht fördern, sondern bedrohen. Die Krisen dieser Welt sind keine Ausnahmen, sondern logische Folge des real existierenden Kapitalismus. Nur wenn die Macht von Großkonzernen und der Finanzwelt eingehegt wird, kann die Politik der Alternativlosigkeit überwunden und die Demokratie gerettet werden.

Drawing from careful examinations of their personal narratives, Jamie L. Bronstein investigates the ways in which working people thought about the good life as seen through their experiences with family and friends, rewarding work, interaction with the natural world, science and creativity, political causes and religious commitments, and physical and economic struggles. Informed by the history of emotions and the philosophical and social-scientific literature on happiness, this book reflects broadly on the industrial-era working-class experience in an era of immense social and economic change.

When They Call You a Terrorist is the essential audiobook for every conscientious American. From one of the cofounders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic audiobook memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors' story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love.

Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the United States following the death of Michael Brown revealed something far deeper than a passionate display of age-old racial frustrations; they unveiled a public chasm that has been growing for years, as America has consistently and intentionally denied significant segments of its population access to full freedom and prosperity.

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and the persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

DYLAN RATIGAN’S mission is to uncover never-before-seen solutions to the most pressing issues of our time: government corruption, corporate communism, an ailing health care system, an age-old dependency on foreign oil, and a broken educational system. In this groundbreaking book, Ratigan makes...

Debtors have been mocked, scolded, and lied to for decades. We have been told that it is perfectly normal to go into debt to get medical care, to go to school, or even to pay for our own incarceration. We’ve been told there is no way to change an economy that pushes the majority into debt while a small minority hoard wealth and power. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that mass indebtedness and extreme inequality are a political choice. In the early days of the crisis, elected officials drew up plans to spend trillions of dollars. The only question was: who would benefit?

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own.