From the Back Cover
"Unequal Gains provides a brilliant historical perspective on the market forces and political currents behind the explosion of economic disparities in the United States over the past four decades. Lindert and Williamson offer essential insights that can help assure a more equal sharing of the gains made possible by American economic growth."--Samuel Bowles, author of The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens
"Unequal Gains is a very important contribution to the study of American economic development, and is particularly relevant for current concerns about the causes and consequences of income inequality. Lindert and Williamson provide new information about the qualitative and quantitative changes since the colonial period, mainly in the United States, but also in comparison with Great Britain and other nations. This is a major scholarly achievement."--Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester
"Unequal Gains is a provocative book that forces us to change the ways we think, write, and teach about American and global economic history. Lindert and Williamson find that Americans have almost always had the world's highest incomes, that the United States may have been the first nation to achieve modern economic growth, and that economic inequality is less a price we pay for progress than a matter of policy choices."--Richard Sylla, New York University
"In this magisterial book, Lindert and Williamson review and reestimate American economic growth and income distribution from before independence to today. The reader follows the growth of the American economy from its modest beginnings to its almost unchallenged global supremacy--but also its many distributional struggles. An indispensable and most pleasurable read."--Branko Milanovic, author of Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality
"What are the relationships among inequality, capitalism, and economic growth in the United States? In Unequal Gains, the two greatest scholars of inequality in the longue durée revisit the data and the arguments and bathe the twentieth-century evidence in historical context."--James A. Robinson, University of Chicago
"This book, written by two of today's most distinguished economic historians, is one of the most impressive and important I have read in recent years. Unequal Gains is a landmark study that contributes in a substantive way to contemporary policy debates."--Peter A. Coclanis, author of The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920
"There is growing academic and policy concern about rising inequality in America, and this timely and engagingly written book has the potential to play an important role in those debates."--Jeremy Atack, coauthor of A New Economic View of American History
Peter H. Lindert is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. His books include Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century. He lives in Davis, California. Jeffrey G. Williamson is the Laird Bell Professor of Economics, emeritus, at Harvard University. His books include Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Both are research associates at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
