The price of inequality

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn´t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn - too late.
In this timely book, Joseph Stiglitz uncovers the sources of our dissatisfaction and identifies three major themes: how markets don´t work the way they are supposed to (being neither efficient nor stable); how political systems fail to correct the shortcomings of the market; and how our current economic and political systems are fundamentally unfair. He focuses chiefly on the gross inequality to which these systems give rise, but also explains how inextricably interlinked they are. Stiglitz argues that inequality is both cause and consequence of the failure of the political system, and moreover that it contributes to the instability of our economic system.