A few weeks back I “reviewed” Kurt Andersen’s book, Evil Geniuses, about the long game played by the American right to take over our political system. The increase in inequality was a prominent part of the book. I made the point in my post that Andersen didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, but that it was helpful to have it all in one place and so well documented.
But it turns out that some folks didn’t already know why inequality has increased dramatically, so they hired a think tank to look into the question.
They could have saved themselves some money and just read Andersen’s book:
“We were shocked by the numbers,” says Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist who came up with the idea for the research along with David Rolf, founder of Local 775 of the Service Employees International Union and president of the Fair Work Center in Seattle. “It explains almost everything. It explains why people are so pissed off. It explains why they are so economically precarious.”
Notably, it isn’t just those in the middle who’ve been hit. RAND found that full-time, prime-age workers in the 25th percentile of the U.S. income distribution would be making $61,000 instead of $33,000 had everyone’s earnings from 1975 to 2018 expanded roughly in line with gross domestic product, as they did during the 1950s and ’60s.
Hanauer and Rolf fingered the specific causes:
They say the blame lies, in large measure, with decades of failed federal policy decisions—allowing the minimum wage to deteriorate, overtime coverage to dwindle, and the effectiveness of labor law to decline, undermining union power. They also cite a shift in corporate culture that has elevated the interests of shareholders over those of workers, an ethos that took root 50 years ago this week with the publication of an essay by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.
Wow. Is it just me, or haven’t all these things been hiding in plain sight for the past fifty years. Do you really need to hire the folks at RAND to figure this out for you?
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