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4 Pages 894 Words

Freedom and unlimited opportunity are two things that come to mind when thinking about what the United States is all about. With changes in the wealth distribution Edward N. Wolff is concerned that with most of the money in the upper class if the U.S. that our economy could fall under hard times. Minorities are especially in danger of the increase in wealth distribution.
The purpose of this book is to inform, evaluate and persuade people on the growing problem of increasing inequality if the wealth in the different countries and compares them to the U.S. today. The audience Wolff is trying to reach is Americans in general and government officials.
This book is clearly written and understandable in the sense that it gives people a transparent view on how Edward N. Wolff feels about American’s current wealth status. It was clear because he described what he felt was the problem, he compared it to other countries, he showed the relationship between wealth inequality and income inequality in America, then gave examples of how to compensate using tax systems from other countries.
This book had some interesting topics that are important to understanding the reason why American’s have an increasing wealth distribution. One of these reasons that Wolff discusses is class difference in wealth composition. The table on page 23 shows that the top 1 percent of households (as ranked by wealth) has 80 percent of their assets in investments and only 8 percent of their total assets are in their house. While the middle three classes have an average of about 60 percent of assets are in their house and only about 13 percent of their total assets in investment. Essentially the top 10 percent of wealthy Americans have most of their assets in investments while the lower percentile doesn’t put as much money in investments (page 23).
One statement that caught my attention came from the back of the book. It reads, “The median white household sti...