Making Sense of Inequality

Not long ago, a former colleague asked me to recommend the best accessible reference on income inequality. I immediately suggested Timothy Noah’s 2010 series of essays, “The Great Divergence,” written for his then-employer, Slate. Why, then, do I find Noah’s new book of the same name — an expansion of the award-winning series — so frustrating?

The book largely follows the outline of the series, with its clearly presented statistics on the rise in inequality and Noah’s impressive explication of what social scientists have found regarding its causes. The frustrations come, in part, from the additional space a book provides for Noah to wade into the perilous business of dot-connecting. But even the original series was irksome in the way it (faithfully) conveyed the conventional wisdom about the supposed connections between inequality, economic mobility, and living standards. Both the original series and the new book are fantastic distillations not only of a messy literature on inequality and its causes, but also of a seriously flawed conventional story about their consequences.