The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy

Why does the modern economy consist of two tracks: a fast one for the super-rich and a stalled one for everyone else? What decisions led to this split three decades ago, and were their goals realised? What is the cost of a two-track economy? Have the real solutions to the 2008-9 been missed?

This ground-breaking book, based on years of research, seeks to answer these questions and provide the hard evidence:

- for the economic case for dismantling the economy for the super-rich;

- that deregulation failed to deliver

innovation and economic revival;

- for new policies that avoid the looming permanent recession.

At a time when top investors such as Warren Buffett call for an end to the coddling of billionaires, this urgent and provocative book provides a new way of thinking for ending the economic deadlock.

Book Author

Stewart Lansley is a writer and economic consultant. After university he became an academic economist holding research posts at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the Centre for Environmental Studies specialising in poverty, inequality and wealth. He has also taught at the Universities of Reading and Brunel. He then moved into television journalism, producing many television series including Breadline Britain, Death of Apartheid, Kenyon Confronts and Food Junkies. He holds awards from the BFI, the New York TV and Film Festival, Sony, Amnesty and was nominated for a ...
more about Stewart Lansley...

Book Reviews

• Institute for Policy Studies
  "Lansley's new work belongs on every “people's library” shelf in an Occupy movement encampment. Your bookshelf, too. "
• New Statesman
  "...exposes the truth about the economic catastrophe that afflicts the western world: neoliberalism has created consumsr societies in which millions are so poor they cannot afford to consume. "
• Church Action on Poverty
  "  Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the reasons behind the astonishing growth in inequality in the UK and US over the past 30 years – and why it helped to bring about the unprecedented economic crisis we are all now facing.   Readable, well-argued and a devastating critique of neo-liberal laissez-faire economics that has allowed the growth of a new generation of super-rich ‘Robber Barrons’ by economist and financial journalist Stuart Lansley."
• Brussels Labour
  "His central argument, impressively documented in a tour through the workings of modern capitalism, is that growing inequality caused the financial meltdown of 2008. ...make everyone you know read this."
• Times Higher Education Supplement
  "  Lansley adds value, making the forceful case that the rapid rise in wages and profits in the financial sector crowded out other forms of private-sector growth.....Lansley's second line of thought is equally compelling.... the central arguments of Lansley's book - and the solutions he proposes - deserve a wide hearing and an urgent place on the policy agenda."
• Guardian
  "Stewart Lansley's seminal book."
• Carl Packman, Left Foot Forward
  "...great new book …  Lansley intricately, and with a great wealth of research, shows us the great failure of neo-liberal politics, and how it is has contributed to today’s normalisation of crisis. But he also develops a reason to dispute TINA (There is No Alternative)."
• Europe’s World
  "This timely book examines the toll that inequality takes on the economy… shows how the real lessons of the financial crisis risk being quietly forgotten… The book’s important message: Inequality does have a cost that policy can and should address."
• Christopher Hird, Red Pepper
  "Crammed with data and evidence, with this book in your hand you never need go into an argument unarmed."
• Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level
  "A great book – read it!"
• Sunday Times
  "Very timely."
• Money Week
  "Clear…correct."
• New Internationalist
  "Places the issue of inequality squarely at the root of the crisis."