The Great Divergence Is An Enlightening And Critical...

Renowned columnist Timothy Noah’s book, The Great Divergence, is an enlightening and critical examination of America’s ever-growing income inequality. Noah distinguishes his book from others of its kind by suggesting a number of surprising causal relationships among American income inequality and a number of unexpected variables. These variables include immigration, inability to fund higher education, tax loopholes for the top tenth of one percent of earners, and unequal government. Additionally, he works with more common predictors of income inequality including race and socioeconomic status. Because of Noah’s thought-provoking, original, and unexpected content, his book reads more similar to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics than the textbook-style approach of William Domhoff’s Who Rules America? Noah’s contribution is not simply another book about the drastic income inequality pervading American society. Instead, delving deep into the true roots of the problem and beginning to understand real solutions, Noah presents a case that is undoubtedly worth reading. While the concepts, statistics, and conclusions Noah raises are vitally important to the overall message of the book, it could never achieve critical acclaim without its accessibility to the everyday reader. While many of the concepts seem above readers’ heads, Noah’s direct, clear, and concise writing style ensures that he will not alienate an audience uninformed about the nuances of the US tax code.