The New Geography of Global Income Inequality :

Rating:
Summary: Are the rich getting richer?
Review: Are rich nations getting richer and poor nations getting poorer? Are the rich nations exploiting the poor nations, as critics of globalization in the trade protest movement suggest? The answer to both questions is no, according to Firebaugh, who shows that world inequality is on the decline. This book should become a classic among scholars, but it should also be of interest to the general public. Firebaugh writes well and uses plain talk and common sense along with plenty of supporting evidence.

Rating:
Summary: The Inequality Transition
Review: Glenn Firebaugh is the first scholar to document an extraordinarily important pattern in modern economic history.

Prior to industrialization, persons in one nation fared about as well as persons in other nations with respect to income and standard of living. Within nations, however,individual deviations from the means of national income were commonly quite large.

One effect of industrialization was to reverse this situation. Today dramatic disparities in income are found between industrial and non-industrial nations, with industrial nations and their citizens being quite well off and non-industrial nations and their citizens being quite poor, on average.

Using highly regarded national income data and bringing to his analysis a set of well-reasoned assumptions, Firebaugh makes an astounding discovery. In the last quarter of the 20th Century income inequality began to increase within nations and
decline across nations. An economic process that has pointed in one direction for over a hundred years has begun to reverse itself.

Firebaugh coins the term "inequality transition" to identify the two stages of an economic process related to the global spread of industrialization. In the first stage, the principal source of global income inequality moves from within-nations to between-nations. In the second stage, the principal source of global income is restored to the historic norm, namely, within-nations. Today we are in the early stages of the second phase of the inequality transition.

Critics of modern, capitalist, industrial expansion have it wrong. Contrary to their pessimistic pronouncements, today, the overwhelming majority of the world's poor are not getting poorer but are getting richer. Spreading industrialization is improving the lot of most of the world's peoples. Indeed, the promise of global economic justice is inherent in the notion "inequality transition."

Rating:
Summary: The Inequality Transition
Review: Glenn Firebaugh is the first scholar to document an extraordinarily important pattern in modern economic history.

Prior to industrialization, persons in one nation fared about as well as persons in other nations with respect to income and standard of living. Within nations, however,individual deviations from the means of national income were commonly quite large.

One effect of industrialization was to reverse this situation. Today dramatic disparities in income are found between industrial and non-industrial nations, with industrial nations and their citizens being quite well off and non-industrial nations and their citizens being quite poor, on average.

Using highly regarded national income data and bringing to his analysis a set of well-reasoned assumptions, Firebaugh makes an astounding discovery. In the last quarter of the 20th Century income inequality began to increase within nations and
decline across nations. An economic process that has pointed in one direction for over a hundred years has begun to reverse itself.

Firebaugh coins the term "inequality transition" to identify the two stages of an economic process related to the global spread of industrialization. In the first stage, the principal source of global income inequality moves from within-nations to between-nations. In the second stage, the principal source of global income is restored to the historic norm, namely, within-nations. Today we are in the early stages of the second phase of the inequality transition.

Critics of modern, capitalist, industrial expansion have it wrong. Contrary to their pessimistic pronouncements, today, the overwhelming majority of the world's poor are not getting poorer but are getting richer. Spreading industrialization is improving the lot of most of the world's peoples. Indeed, the promise of global economic justice is inherent in the notion "inequality transition."

Rating:
Summary: Much of What You Thought You Knew Is Wrong
Review: Much of what you thought you knew is wrong! If you are seriously interested in globabilization and recent trends in world income inequality, you need to read Glenn Firebaugh's The New Geography of Global Income Inequality (Harvard U. Press, 2003). In a straightforward and detailed presentation, Firebaugh explains the arithmetic of inequality -- how it divides into within-nation and between-nation components. He then charts each of these, both over-time and at the present time. You will learn where the U.S. fits in the world, and which countries and continents are at the top and the bottom in terms of income and inequality in income. Most important, you will see that, contrary to much current journalistic and even scholarly writing, world income inequality has actually been decreasing since the 1990s. This books complements and in important ways adds to recent books by Stiglitz, Easterly, Soros, Bhalla, Diamond, and Landes

Rating:
Summary: Much of What You Thought You Knew Is Wrong
Review: Much of what you thought you knew is wrong! If you are seriously interested in globabilization and recent trends in world income inequality, you need to read Glenn Firebaugh's The New Geography of Global Income Inequality (Harvard U. Press, 2003). In a straightforward and detailed presentation, Firebaugh explains the arithmetic of inequality -- how it divides into within-nation and between-nation components. He then charts each of these, both over-time and at the present time. You will learn where the U.S. fits in the world, and which countries and continents are at the top and the bottom in terms of income and inequality in income. Most important, you will see that, contrary to much current journalistic and even scholarly writing, world income inequality has actually been decreasing since the 1990s. This books complements and in important ways adds to recent books by Stiglitz, Easterly, Soros, Bhalla, Diamond, and Landes

Rating:
Summary: The New Global Equality
Review: This thorough and informative investigation should be rewarding reading for anyone who is interested in understanding the past, assessing the present, and thinking about the future of world income inequality. This book puts conventional wisdom to the test about the course of global income inequality at a time when alarms are being sounded about large-scale economic changes that are occurring throughout the world with increasing globalization. Among the claims of conventional wisdom that this book challenges are: (1) world income inequality is increasing across nations, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer; (2) globalization exacerbates inequality across nations; and (3) international exchange is inherently exploitative. One of the nice things that the author is able to do is point out how inequality within nations and inequality between nations contribute to the overall level of global income inequality. I would recommend this book to readers of all ideological persuasions who are interested in a thoughtful presentation and discussion of evidence about a contentious issue.