Book Review: Occupy The Future by David B. Grusky et al blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/06/27/book-review-occupy-the-future/ The Occupy Wall Street movement ignited new questions about the relationship between democracy and equality in the United States. Can we build an open, democratic, and successful movement to realize new ideals? Occupy the Future aims to offer informed and opinionated essays that address questions on democracy, freedom, and capitalism. Much of this book serves as a useful primer for those interested in the rise of inequality in the US, writes Stephanie Spoto. Occupy The Future. David B. Grusky, Doug McAdam, Rob Reich, & Debra Satz (eds.) MIT Press. February 2013. Find this book: In December 2011, a group of students and Stanford faculty prepared for an “Occupy-inspired” teach-in at the university, which led to the creation of this edited collection. The contributors form an impressive list of academic superstars, the students of superstars, and even a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Many of the contributors have dedicated their careers to the study of economic inequality and social justice, making them the perfect set of academic minds for this project. Many of the adjectives that have been used to describe the Occupy movement can also be used to describe some chapters in this collection; just like the protests themselves, these chapters are well-meaning, passionate, but – in the end – vague. However, perhaps one of the most notable confusions is with the subject of the book itself. While the title of the book and the aesthetic of the cover (with a graffiti wording on a rough brick wall) would suggest that the book is, in fact, about the Occupy protests themselves, most of the essays that make up this collection only occasionally address Occupy. Instead, the book addresses wider economic inequality, with class-based issues dominating much of the word count, just as it dominated much of the discourse of the Occupy sites themselves. The chapters by Prudence L. Carter and Shelley J. Correll make for great analysis of gender and racial inequality, but seemed marginalized by the discussions of economic inequality, without much acknowledgement of the intersectionality of oppression from the other chapters. The first few chapters on economic inequality make no concerted effort to include critiques of race or gender hierarchies within these economic models, with nostalgic looks at decades gone by failing to talk about how, for many, many people in the United States, the situation has greatly improved. This is perhaps exemplified by a figure taken from an article from the American Sociological Review, showing the increase of inequality, but including only men’s wages in the data set. The chapter, “Why is There So Much Poverty?” by David B. Grusky and Kim A. Weeden argues that so many people are in low-wage jobs because of barriers to higher education. If more people had access to college degrees then they could apply for jobs with higher salaries, siphoning off numbers from the pool of jobseekers without college degrees, thereby making it possible for ‘unskilled’ workers to apply for jobs with less competition. They even seem to suggest that Stanford should be “meeting the rising interest in its degrees by selling some profit-maximizing number of them” (p.79). They mention “European-style market regulations”, which they admit might reduce poverty, but have a negative effect on the Gross National Product. American free-market models, on the other hand, create “a highly competitive and regulation-free economy, with the happy result that there are more goods and services for 1/2