WEALTH, POVERTY AND POLITICS

“Wealth, Poverty and Politics” is a study of disparities in income and wealth among individuals, groups and nations—and of the causes and effect of such disparities.

Among the causes examined are geographic, democgraphic, cultural and institutional factors, as well as unpredictable happenstances such as the outcomes of military battles or political decisions that changed the course of history. Politics has been both a cause and an effect of disparities in income and wealth, and political or ideological struggles have contributed to much confusion about both causes and effects, including common but crucial misunderstandings of income and wealth statistics.
Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth. We cannot properly understand inequality if we focus exclusively on the distribution of wealth and ignore wealth production factors such as geography, demography, and culture.

“Wealth, Poverty and Politics” approaches economic disparities from the standpoint of differences in the PRODUCTION of wealth. This is in contrast with the more common practice of focusing on money flows (income)that result from the production process. This common practice largely ignores production itself as something in the dim background that just happens “somehow.” Politics, and especially ideological politics, tends to overlook or under-rate such general causes of economic disparities as geography, demography and culture, while concentrating on causes that feature villains and heroes. The consequences of such political melodrama extend beyond intellectual confusion to counterproductive economic policies and social consequences that include polarization, violence and bloodshed.
Transcending partisanship through a careful examination of data, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics reveals the truth about the most explosive political issue of our time.

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and has taught economics at Cornell, UCLA, and Amherst. The author of Intellectuals and Society and the classic Basic Economics, among others, Sowell lives in Stanford, California.