David B. Grusky is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. He is coauthor of The Inequality Puzzle (2010) and coeditor of The Great Recession (2011) and The Inequality Reader (2011). Tamar Kricheli-Katz is Assistant Professor in the Buchman Faculty of Law and in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.

Income inequality is an increasingly pressing issue in the United States and around the world. This book explores five critical issues to introduce some of the key moral and empirical questions about income, gender, and racial inequality:

Do we have a moral obligation to eliminate poverty?

Is inequality a necessary evil that's the best way available to motivate economic action and increase total outpt?

Can we retain a meaningful democracy even when extreme inequality allows the rich to purchase political privilege?

Is the recent stalling out of long-term declines in gender inequality a historic reversal that presages a new gender order?

How are racial and ethnic inequalities likely to evolve as minority populations grow ever larger, as intermarriage increases, and as new forms of immigration unfold?

Leading public intellectuals debate these questions in a no-holds-barred exploration of our New Gilded Age.