If like me, you are a left-of-centre sociologist, who reads (and likes) a fair bit of economics, you'll love this book. After three decades of hearing about the dangers of taxes, transfers, and government intervention from neo-liberal economists, it is a relief to read a coherent account of how politics and power have been destroying our social fabric. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist, chair of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors and then chief economist at the World Bank, is a first-rate economist who challenges his own field's conventional wisdom using the rigorous methods that empirical sociologists cannot but help admire.

I take that back. The Politics of Inequality is not a ‘rigorous’ work in the conventional academic sense, carefully parsing the causal mechanisms behind the inequality surge in the West. It is written for a much broader audience than the specialised world of academic economists. It also ventures into unusual terrain for an economist – the world of politics and power.

The general thesis is that money follows power, particularly political power. Rising inequality is the result of the growing influence of economic elites over public policy. The core thesis not far from what I learned in my first courses in political sociology in the 1960s (see Gerhard Lenski, Power and Privilege, Reference Lenski1966). To illustrate, the concept of ‘rent-seeking’ plays a central role in his argument. ‘Rent-seeking’ in contemporary economic jargon means much the same thing as ‘exploitation’ does in Marxist jargon. In Stiglitz's terms (2012: 12), rents mean ‘getting income not as a reward to creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would have been produced without their effort’. In Stiglitz's account, rent-seeking by banks and financial sector firms plays a particularly important role in accounting for the recent inequality surge.

Over more than 400 pages, Stiglitz provides a coherent (more about what we mean by coherence below) and always lively account of what went wrong in the past three decades, ranging from budget and regulatory politics to globalisation, technology and the ‘framing’ of these developments in academic and political discourse. The Price of Inequality is the world of the right-wing think tank turned upside down. Rather than fuelling our animal spirits to ever-greater productivity as the think tank orthodoxy goes, high inequality leads to lower growth, less efficiency, and wasted opportunities for individuals and for society and economy as a whole. High inequality is both the cause and effect of democratic decline and underinvestment in infrastructure and essential public services.

I've followed the research literature and policy debates on this topic for almost three decades. But Stigliz teaches new things, raises new issues and offers original and intriguing hypotheses. It is a great book.

If, in contrast, you are looking for a careful scholarly assessment of the volumes of high-quality research on the inequality surge produced over the past decade and more, you will be disappointed. The Price of Inequality is not written primarily as an academic treatise. I was unable to find a review of the book in a major economics journal and don't expect to find many in the future.

The Price of Inequality is one of a growing genre of books written by all-star, left-of- centre, scholars turned ‘public intellectuals’. Stiglitz's fellow economist and Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman writes a regular column on economic issues for the New York Times. Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson authors of Off Center (Reference Hacker and Pierson2006) and Winner Take All Politics (Reference Hacker and Pierson2010) are prominent exemplars. All hold senior posts at elite American universities, have walls covered with academic awards for their previous scholarship and are top-notch writers and communicators.

These new public intellectuals are attempting to turn the tables on the well-funded, right-wing think tanks that have been so effective at producing the dominant economic, political and social narratives that have shaped the thinking of American policy elites since the 1980s. However, the construction of a persuasive and coherent counter-narrative that can easily be communicated and engage a broad audience, demands a very different kind of writing than the more tentative academic style that got them published in the top academic journals earlier in their careers. Award-winning scholarship requires the author to take account of all of the relevant information and especially information that potentially could undermine and falsify the theory. Highlighting evidence that is inconsistent with the narrative, in contrast, erodes narrative consistency. Instead of an effective call to action, it typically concludes with a call for ‘more research’. Think tank discourse, on the other hand, simplifies and focusses an argument on a single simple story, usually linked to a favoured policy option. There is a serious clash of academic and epistemic cultures here.

There are trade-offs involved here, but in the end Stiglitz is playing a very important social role. I occasionally found myself annoyed with Stiglitz when reading sections on topics I am familiar with. I wanted to ask: ‘What about this or that highly regarded study that doesn't sit easily with your claims?’ Many of their academic peers deride the work of the ‘public intellectuals’ for just this reason. They've abandoned the intellectual purity of the ivory tower for the hard-scrabble street fighting of contemporary politics. The trade-offs must be acknowledged, but in the end this critique is uncompelling. In the long run, ‘more research’ or ‘more and better theory’ may indeed answer unanswered questions. But as Keynes observed ‘in the long run we are all dead’ and in the meantime millions of lives and trillions of dollars are at stake. Academics have responsibilities of citizenship in the short and medium term, not just scholarship over the long run. Like Martin Luther, there is a time to take a stand. We don't need more celebrity intellectuals, more famous for being famous, than anything else. Nor do we need more simplistic critiques of economics, from left-wing sociologists or others who have not entered into the debates on their own terms. But we need more of Joseph Stiglitz and his ilk, high quality work that challenges simplistic think tank and conservative orthodoxy with serious theory, data and policy alternatives.