100 books like The Spirit Level

Our nation’s most insightful—and readable—sociologist? Boston College’s Juliet Schorr has my vote.

Over the past quarter-century, Schor has probably done more than anyone else in the world to bring grand conceptual constructs like income distribution down to the nitty-gritty of daily life.

Her 1999  best-seller, The Overspent American, strikingly exposes how inequality unleashes a “competitive consumption” dynamic that has us consuming ever more and enjoying life ever less. And that dynamic poses more dangers today than ever before.

As Schor put it in an interview with her I did some years back, we have “no chance” at achieving ecological sustainability “with the kind of extreme income distribution” that we have today. 

Great fiction books can teach us how inequality operates in everyday life better than any scientific research. 

Americanah is the love story of Ifemelu and Obinze, whose lives diverge when one moves to the US and the other to the UK to converge fifteen years later back in Nigeria. 

Through their life stories, we understand what intersectionality really means: class, gender, and race interact to make inequality and discrimination particularly problematic. 

Adichie is a fantastic writer who combines humor and kindness to reflect the complexities of contemporary inequality within and across borders.

What ideas do you have about what the first peoples were like, and how human society developed?

Maybe you’ve even read the popular authors on this topic such as Diamond, Harari, Pinker, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Prepare to have all of your notions and received opinions upended and turned to dust by David Graeber (a man universally acknowledged as a genius) and the book he worked on for the last ten years of his life, which brings revolutionary ideas to 30,000 years of civilization.

If you are looking for an “Eureka!” moment while reading about celebrity, you can start with Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, first published in 2000 and re-issued with a new preface in 2020.

Putnam convincingly shows how Americans have become increasingly disconnected – from bowling leagues, from PTAs, neighborhood associations, from all forms of membership organizations.

Why did this happen? Putnam blames television and now the fragmented internet for the decline in these civic assets. I think that, more specifically, celebrity has become the opiate of the masses.

Celebrity worship has become a weapon of mass distraction. We suffer from an excess of individualism that will not end until we begin to accept and embrace the common good we all share.

When you combine the rise of celebrity with the decline of civic assets, that’s America today.

It always seemed to me that public ownership could be a way to unlock better use of resources, and didn’t believe it was the same as Soviet-style economic planning. But I didn’t really know what it did mean!  So, I bought Hanna’s book as soon as it came out in 2018, and wasn’t disappointed. He is Research Director at the Democracy Collaborative, and shows by example how public ownership comes in many varieties. He debunks the myths about it being worse than corporate or private ownership, showing how it can be more efficient and effective. Read this to see how public ownership in one form or another is a sensible and pragmatic option that can help address the really big social challenges such as inequality, sustainability, and fragility.

I can’t say how much I love this book. It explains everything we know intuitively about economics but find hard to justify. Hudson was one of the few who saw the 2008 crisis coming, and he is still one of the few who know what we must do now. Taking the discussion of David Graeber’s extraordinary 2011 book Debt: The First 5000 Years to the next level, Hudson shows how Bronze Age rulers understood economic instability better than we do. When people get into serious debt, their personal crises not only destroy their own lives but ripple outwards to derail society, by giving their creditors enough power to compete with governments. To avoid society being run into the ground, governments must start cancelling debts – as they did long ago.

I have always loved Branko Milanović’s way of addressing complex topics in a very accessible and usually highly original way.

In this book, Milanović pays much attention to the rich and the super-rich and devises a way of comparing their wealth across the ages by asking this simple question: how much labour could they command in their own historical period and socio-economic context?

So, for example, Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest Roman of Caesar’s times, could, with the yearly income from his vast possessions, command the work of 32,000 people. But, as Milanović argues, today’s super-rich are richer than past ones–circa 2010, the richest person in the world was the telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, who could command the work of 440,000 Mexicans.

US elite universities are both an engine of inequality and an environment where inequality is particularly evident. 

In this book Harvard professor Abraham Jack explores how low-income students fare when accepted to a prestigious and expensive college.

The book distinguishes between the “privileged poor” who attended private high schools before arriving to campus and the “double disadvantaged” which come from underfunded, state schools. 

Through many interviews and everyday examples, Abraham Jack shows how inequality is both about income and social capital and demonstrates the complexity of creating a more just society in a country like the United States. 

Although the book is less relevant to understand other countries, this is social science at its best.

Frank is, in my view, one of the most engaging writers on inequality. 

He has developed interesting insights like the “winner takes-all society”: the idea that we live in a world in which a small group of people reaps most of the benefits in all markets from sports to music or academia. 

In Falling Behind, Frank shows how inequality does not only harm the poor but the middle class as well.

I like how he combines economic data with many examples to show how consumption patterns among the wealthy lead to an “expenditure cascades” that force the middle class to borrow too much money and consume more than it should. 

The book is a reminder that inequality must be explored from many dimensions and its solution will require a lot of creativity.

The climate crisis, many of us now understand, may just end up crushing us. What can save us from that crushing?

Greater income equality, the former World Bank economist Herman Daly argued in this concise 1996 volume, has to be central to our solution. Daly, who passed away in 2022, pioneered the discipline of ecological economics.

Our planet, this University of Maryland professor emeritus believed, has “a limit to the total material production that the ecosystem can support.” In other words, we can’t afford to continue grasping for ever more.

We need to center ourselves instead around having enough, and that means, Daly concluded, moving toward adopting a “maximum personal income” since having 99 percent of a limited total product “go to only one person” would be “clearly unjust.”