Reviews for Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality

The average rating for Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-21 00:00:00 Brandon Lau This book feels a lot like a missed opportunity: it could have done so much more, and be a rebuttal to Murray's Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010 , but sadly, it does not. In a nutshell, the central argument the authors make is: it is not true that Americans are against taxes: they are happy to pay them if they go to deserving causes, which include education projects as well as helping out those hard working people who have lost their job through no fault of their own. This is based on evidence coming from various surveys plus one commissioned by the authors. The two main shortcomings for me are first of all, as several people have already noted, the books is quite repetitive. Secondly, they could have done much more in presenting the data - these are almost always presented disaggregated by the categories "All americans, Republicans, High income", with no further "shading", e.g. controlling for the type of occupation, or geographical location, number of children and so on. It could be because this would have generated a sparsely populated table (after all, their original survey only includes just over 600 individuals), but still it would have been good to know. For instance, when the authors state that Only 30 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of the affluent support "decreased" taxes in general, we do not know how much these two categories overlap, so that it could in principle be that no Republicans are affluent, so that there is a 60% support for decreased taxes. In addition, if the evidence is so strong, they should have let it speak more, whereas in various places the exposition feels not at all objective (e.g. when a 4% changes from modest to many, as in "the modest 35 percent who said they favored abolishing the estate tax" and "many Americans (39 percent) realize that lower-income people pay more of their earnings in payroll taxes"). Or similarly, not really probing the isues, as for instance when they claim that Republicans do not represent their voters: so why do voters keep voting them? In short, I am glad I read this book as it was somewhat informative, but I am glad this was one of the monthly freebies from the University of Chicago Press.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-02-05 00:00:00 Daniel Tagliareni Class War is written by political scientists who, via various surveys through time, have found Americans are conservative egalitarians, conservative philosophically, but often liberal operationally. They think this is news the nation needs to hear and should alter policy, as Americans, at least in surveys, are willing to increase taxes to provide a social safety net and to bring income and wealth inequality more into balance. It is an intriguing, even hopeful, thought, but this brief book would have been better as a briefer article as the authors repeat themselves and drag out every description.