Winner-Take-All Politics
How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
An argument that American inequality is a political achievement rather than a market outcome.
Hacker and Pierson argue that the concentration of American income at the very top is not what markets or technology did on their own, but what thirty years of policy produced in tax, finance and labour law under sustained organised pressure. Their evidence is comparative: other rich countries had the same technology and did not get the same result.
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Robert J. Shiller
If the technology is the same, why would there be a difference at the extreme high end? And they argue that the answer is really political. There have been political changes in the US that allow the extreme high end to garner more wealth. Ultimately, it represents a failure of our society to take account of the fact that the extreme high end can lobby and can organise for its own interests, and we’ve let it happen.
Interview · January 2018
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