The Myth of American Inequality

In The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate, which the Wall Street Journal named a best book of 2022, former United States Senator Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early challenge popular notions about income inequality and its effect on Americans.The Myth of American Inequality shows “that the way we collect and report statistics has significantly overstated inequality and understated national well-being” and “that the explosion of transfer payments following the War on Poverty has caused a significant number of prime work-age persons to become detached from the economy. That disengagement from the world of work has denied them the opportunity to benefit from the extraordinary economic progress that has occurred in the last 50 years and is the largest single cause of income inequality in postwar America” (167–68).At Hudson, Senator Gramm and Hudson President and CEO John P. Walters will discuss how economic statistics suggest cohesion rather than divergence among Americans, and why this cohesion is likely to continue.