cover image Prosperity Lost

Prosperity Lost

Philip Mattera. Addison Wesley Publishing Company, $21.33 (247pp) ISBN 978-0-201-19897-3

Calling the 1980s ``a decade of denial,'' Mattera ( Inside U.S. Business ) scrutinizes the widening gap between rich and poor, the shrinking middle class, increasing feminization of poverty and declining black enrollments in college. Opposed to Reaganite trickle-down ideology, he favors the rebuilding of federal housing programs decimated during the '80s, tax-law changes to end merger mania, ceilings on incomes of the rich. Some of his proposals seem utopian or sketchy--for instance, a guaranteed income plan, or the large-scale creation of noncapitalist, worker and consumer cooperatives--but Mattera grounds his blueprint for change in an astute analysis of the past decade of laissez-faire greed. In timely, hard-hitting arguments, he urges that corporate polluters pay a penalty, and that adverse environmental impacts of production be made part of the accounting process at both the national and corporate levels. (Sept.)