#7 - Evaluation of authority and currency of book in post #3

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.