This week we will be hosting a roundtable on Larry Bartels’s “book”:http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Democracy-Political-Economy-Gilded/dp/0691136637 _Unequal Democracy_. This book, first published in 2008, has occasioned a great deal of debate about the sources and consequences of inequality in the United States. “Here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LABDYamJwSc is Bartels talking about its origins. See also his “earlier posts”:http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/table-for-one/2008/05/11-week/ at Talking Points Memo. “Here”:http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/ is his homepage.
Ours is not the first such roundtable — see “here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJHrw8tO0U8 or “here”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=PPS&volumeId=7&seriesId=0&issueId=01 (gated). But this roundtable will offer not only several unique perspectives but also the opportunity to draw on research on inequality that has been conducted since the book’s debut.
The contributors to the roundtable are:
* “Lane Kenworthy”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkenwor/ is a Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona and the author of the blog “Consider the Evidence”:http://lanekenworthy.net/.
* “Paul Pierson”:http://polisci.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/person_detail.php?person=24 and “Jacob Hacker”:http://www.yale.edu/polisci/people/jhacker.html are Professors of Political Science at, respectively, the University of California, Berkeley and Yale. They are the authors of _Winner-Take-All Politics_ (“here”:http://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer-Turned/dp/1416588698 and see also Henry’s “review”:http://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/15/review-jacob-hacker-and-paul-pierson-winner-take-all-politics/), which also investigates the politics behind growing inequality in the United States.
* “Will Wilkinson”:http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/ is a writer and blogger whose work appears or has appeared in multiple places, including The Week, the Atlantic Monthly, and The Economist (he is W.W. “here”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/), among others. With Brink Lindsey, he is working on a book tentatively titled _The Free-Market Progressive_. “Here”:http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/03/31/unequal-democracy/ are his thoughts on _Unequal Democracy_, as of p.3 of the book.
We are grateful to all of them. Today and tomorrow, The Monkey Cage will feature their reviews of the book. Bartels’s response to each review will follow. We invite readers to comment at any point.