Income inequality has emerged as a central fact of the modern U.S. economy, one that President Obama is expected to denounce as a growing threat to the American dream of upward mobility in his State of the Union address next week.The paper by Barry Z. Cynamon and Steven M. Fazzari says that stagnant income for the “bottom 95 percent” of wage earners makes it impossible for them to consume as they did in the years before the downturn.

Professor Mark Rank talks about poverty in America is mainstream.

David Cunningham demonstrates that the Klan organized most successfully where whites perceived civil rights reforms to be a significant threat to their status, where mainstream outlets for segregationist resistance were lacking, and where the policing of the Klan's activities was lax.

This book collects essays about these events from prominent macroeconomists who developed a perspective that predicted the broad outline and many specific aspects of the crisis. From this point of view, the recovery of employment and revival of strong growth requires more than short-term monetary easing and temporary fiscal stimulus.