Money: Who Has How Much and Why.

Readers will find lots of fascinating tidbits in Andrew Hacker's Money. There are more attorneys in America than there are adults in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Saint Louis combined. The attorney general of the United States makes roughly the same salary as a well-paid professor at Wellesley College (and $30,000 less than another professor in the same discipline at Brandeis). Americans of Dutch origin have lower incomes than those of Thai ancestry - and this before Tiger Woods earned a penny. Indian engineers man the New York City subway system. We even learn what Hacker himself makes, although only his salary; Hacker keeps his income from his writing secret (as I will my fee for this review).

One of the questions that puzzle Hacker is not why some make so much, but how others can survive on so little. Salaries were relatively low twenty or thirty years ago, but people still got by - often on one income. They did so, Hacker reminds us, because how we spend is as important as what we make; if we happily drank Maxwell House, we never needed to spend what we now do on Starbucks. Of course, there are still some of us who get by on very little: Airline reservationists in New Mexico make about $14,000 a year. How do they manage? They postpone marriage and children, double up on jobs, and take satisfaction in the fact that they are not on welfare.

Hacker rightly refuses to get engaged in efforts to define with precision how many social classes there are in America and where the lines between them can be drawn. He prefers more capacious and flexible categories. By his rough estimates, 28.4 percent of Americans are economically deprived, 53 percent are coping, and 18.6 percent are comfortable. The bulk of his book deals with the last of these categories: chief executive officers (CEOs), doctors, lawyers, even professors.

Not everything Hacker offers here is news. We do not need his book to be reminded of the absurd salaries offered to CEOs by grateful directors at Disney and AT&T. Nor is it a surprise to learn that the poorest Americans have not done as well over the long twenty-year stock-market boom as the wealthiest Americans. Hacker is better when he goes against the grain. Why, he asks, given the $672 million in stock awards that the CEO at Coca Cola made after fifteen years of service in 1995, did the fifteen-year veteran at Ashland Oil make only $3 million in stock awards? And if it a surprise to learn that not all CEOs reap unimaginable profits, it is a shock to discover that the gap between the household income of the richest and poorest states was actually cut in half between 1960 and 1995, which suggests that, as a nation, we are more unified, and less regionalized, than ever before.

All of which reinforces the point that, when money is king, stability is illusory. Humongous family fortunes, Hacker reminds us, can be passed down to the next generation and the one after that, but not much beyond two. Americans would have a hard time even recognizing the names of some of their richest compatriots, such as Arthur Blank (Home Depot) or Frederick Smith (Federal Express). Doctors have seen their salaries shrink as health-maintenance organizations have grown. Professors will someday lose tenure. There are more women bartenders than men, and, if present trends continue, there will soon be more women pharmacists than men. A sociological portrait of money will never be a still photograph.

Emulating that great student of emulation, Thorsten Veblen, Hacker has written a book which is informative and entertaining. But it is also on occasion annoying. Not content just to describe America, which he does exceedingly well, Hacker also comments on it, and here his judgments are not always acute.

"Does America's way of allocating money make any sense at all?" Hacker asks. Clearly he doesn't think so. CEOs claim that their salaries are justified by the fact that other companies offer them even more to move, "and yet," Hacker writes, "one might ask why the Ford Foundation felt compelled to bestow $839,139 on its presiding officer. It is unlikely that he is besieged with offers from Exxon or Dupont...." I consider myself no great admirer of the Ford Foundation (whose presiding officer, by the way, is a woman), but the fact that she makes eight times more than the average full professor at Princeton does not strike me as especially heinous. Having spent some time watching how foundation - or university - presidents spend their time, I would gladly accept a significantly lower income to spend more time with my family.

Like Veblen, Hacker reaches for ironic notes, but without the Norwegian's phrase-making talents. A few of the great-grandchildren of nineteenth-century capitalists remain active in philanthropic or public life, but we should not imagine that the rest are useless or lazy: "Perfecting a golf swing and deciding what to wear at a benefit require more time and dedication than the rest of us might think." Law firms insist that they are doing their best to promote black partners. "Perhaps," Hacker comments, "they are looking for a fledgling Colin Powell with a legal degree."

Hacker satisfies a great deal of our curiosity about money. But his editorializing, especially when his irony is so heavy-handed, backfires. One thing about money: It's a subject in which we all take an interest. Hacker's skill at presenting numbers and his generally playful tone provide all the indignation his book needs. For those reasons alone, Money is worth the money.

Alan Wolfe teaches sociology and political science at Boston University. His most recent book is Marginalized in the Middle (University of Chicago Press).