Book: The shrinking American middle class: the social and cultural implications of growing inequality. Author: Joseph Dillon Davey (published 2012).
The author, Joseph Dillon Davey, is currently a professor in
the Department of Law and Justice at Rowan University in New Jersey. He has worked as a professor at this university
for almost 18 years. He has a law degree
from St. John’s University School of Law (Queens, NY) and a PhD in Political
Science/Public Policy Analysis from the City University of New York (received
in 1997). He has written 5 books on
various social and legal issues (e.g. crime and the state of U.S. prisons, government
powers, moral values of college students, and economic equality). Though his interests are varied, he has
considered economic inequality in at least two books, so this is a topic that
he clearly seems to have studied closely.
He has also published a number of scholarly papers on similar topics. Based on these credentials, his published work
on the American middle class should be very reliable (though I might note that
any project on the middle class should supplement his work by with something
written by someone with expertise in economics, which is not part of his
credentials). This information came from
the author’s curriculum vitae, which is available from his Rowan University
faculty website (http://www.rowan.edu/open/RUFaculty/cv_pdf/Joseph%20Dillon%20Davey%20bio.pdf).
The shrinking American middle class was published in
2012. Economic inequality is a topic
very much in the news, as it seems to get worse each year, so some of the
information in Davey’s book might already have been rendered questionable 4
years later. But much of the information
and analysis should still be accurate, and certainly any historical information
will be valid and useful. Any project on
the topic of the middle class in the U.S. should be supplemented by more
recently published information.
