As for inequality, I discovered years ago that Americans aren't much bothered by it. A piece I wrote in Washington in the '80s about the "new" growth in income disparity was greeted with shrugs and the general belief that people achieve the economic success they deserve. It's part of the American Dream mythology that people easily and often migrate upward to a higher income status. Inequality, it's believed, is a necessary motivator. Or, as it's often put, Americans believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
It sounds nice, but Hacker and Pierson found that mobility has come nowhere close to matching the rise of inequality over the last 30 years. Over a decade's time four in five Americans tend to stay in their same quintile, or nearly so. As for generational mobility, people in Australia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Spain, France and Canada have a better chance of moving up.
Another popular argument is that inequality is the price Americans pay for a growing economy. But Hacker and Pierson have their doubts. During the 1979-2006 period, if all new income had been shared as broadly as it was in the 1950s and '60s, the average household in the poorest quintile would have earned $6,000 a year more every year; the average household in the middle quintile would have earned more than $12,000 more every year; and the average household in the top 1 percent would have earned $700,000 less every year — about $500,000 per year in 2006 dollars rather than $1.2 million. While it's true that the U.S. experienced phenomenal growth during the last three decades, other Western nations matched our growth and in some cases exceeded it without hyperconcentrations of wealth at the top.
Technology, globalization and educational deficiency fail to explain how the wealthy were able to reshape the U.S. economy into a winner-take-all system that, in a distributive sense, resembles more closely the oligarchic systems of Mexico, Brazil and Russia than the economies of other Western democracies.
Even in the depths of the worst economic meltdown since the 1930s, there have been no hints of insurrection, no clouds of teargas rolling through the streets, no pitchforks pointed at the Wall Street elite who, along with their lax government regulators, perpetrated the current hardship.
Looking back over 30 years it's clear that the organized efforts of big business and its allies to influence public policy have overwhelmed the disorganized middle class.
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