Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do about It

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Teri Schnaubelt
Audiobook
8 hr 33 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

Do we have to choose between equality and prosperity? Many think that reducing economic inequality would require such heavy-handed interference with market forces that it would stifle economic growth. Heather Boushey insists nothing could be further from the truth. Presenting cutting-edge economics with journalistic verve, she shows how rising inequality has become a drag on growth and an impediment to a competitive United States marketplace for employers and employees alike. Boushey argues that inequality undermines growth in three ways. It obstructs the supply of talent, ideas, and capital as wealthy families monopolize the best educational, social, and economic opportunities. It also subverts private competition and public investment. Powerful corporations muscle competitors out of business, in the process costing consumers, suppressing wages, and hobbling innovation, while governments underfund key public goods that make the American Dream possible, from schools to transportation infrastructure to information and communication technology networks. Finally, it distorts consumer demand as stagnant wages and meager workplace benefits rob ordinary people of buying power and pushes the economy toward financial instability. Unbound exposes deep problems in the US economy, but its conclusion is optimistic.

About the author

Heather Boushey is President and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and former Chief Economist on Hillary Clinton's transition team. She is the author of Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict and coeditor of After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality.

Teri Schnaubelt is a Chicago-based stage, on-camera, and voice actor as well as oil painter and photographer. She has voiced over 100 books for New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors, in addition to helping independent authors get their stories heard.

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