From a book review at Foreign Affairs:
The dramatic growth of inequality, then, is the result not of the “natural” workings of the market but of four decades’ worth of deliberate political choices. Hacker and Pierson amass a great deal of evidence for this proposition, which leads them to the crux of their argument: that not just the U.S. economy but also the entire U.S. political system has devolved into a winner-take-all sport. They portray American politics not as a democratic game of majority rule but rather as a field of “organized combat” — a struggle to the death among competing organized groups seeking to influence the policymaking process. Moreover, they suggest, business and the wealthy have all but vanquished the middle class and have thus been able to dominate policymaking for the better part of 40 years with little opposition.
It’s old – but persistant news – and the end-game is already reached. A bankrupt state and people.
15 charts on the same issue here.
