There exist eight reliable ways to increase poverty and the United States is now pursuing seven of them, according to Lebergott. His provocative examination of income and wealth in this country reveals the impossibility of ending poverty permanently without changing American capitalism beyond...

Changing consumer choices have built microchip factories where cotton fields used to be and have doomed cities from New Bedford to Detroit, while the impact of these choices on jobs and tax revenues has stimulated the creation of models of consumer behavior. Even finely tuned econometric models,...