- Politics and Policy of Inequality

Catalog description

An exploration of different aspects of economic inequality, the different ways of measuring it, the implications for Americans’ lives, and how they relate to social and political justice. Americans are now living in what has been called a “second gilded age,” with higher levels of economic inequality than any time in the past hundred years. In this course, we will focus on why our political institutions seem to be so unresponsive to the increase in inequality and what it says about the nature of our democratic system. We will also examine how different public policies shape and refract the social and political effects of inequality.