Inequality, Federalism, and Politics in the U.S.: A Review Essay Donald F. Kettl, The Divided States of America: Why Federalism Doesn't Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). 236 pp. (including index) $27.95 (hardback), ISBN: 978‐0‐691‐18227‐8. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 247 pp. (including index) $16.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978‐0‐465‐09620‐6.

• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Author: Uday Desai
• Date: 01 January 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13448

184 Public Administration Review • January | Fe bruary 20 22

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 82, Iss. 1, pp. 184–190. © 2021 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13448.

Uday Desai is Professor Emeritus and

former Director of the School of Public

Administration at the University of New

Mexico. He has been a Visiting Professor

in the School of Public Policy and

Administration, Carleton University, Ottawa,

and a Visiting Scholar at the University of

Texas at Austin. He has also been a visiting

research scholar at Rutgers University, a

Fulbright Senior Specialist at University

College Cork, Ireland, and a Fulbright

Scholar at the University of Malaysia-

Sabah. He served as Co-Editor and Editor-

in-chief of

Policy Studies Journal

from 1990

to 2002. He has published widely on public

administration and the nonprofit sector

topics in major peer-reviewed journals. He

is also author or editor of four books.

Email: ucdesai@unm.edu

Inequality, Federalism, and Politics in the U.S.: A Review

Essay Donald F. Kettl, The Divided States of America: Why

Federalism Doesn’t Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 2020). 236 pp. (including index) $27.95 (hardback),

ISBN: 978-0-691-18227-8.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse

Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System

Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic

Books, 2012). 247 pp. (including index) $16.99 (paperback),

ISBN: 978-0-465-09620-6.

“Over more than two centuries, the United

States has stirred a very wide range of

feelings in the rest of the world: love

and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe

and anger. But there is one emotion that has never

been directed towards the US until now—pity.”

(O’Toole 2020).

Early U.S. response to the Covid 19 pandemic baffled

its allies across the world. For months they watched

the government’s weak and haphazard lock-downs and

other pre-vaccine responses to the deadly virus with

alarm and puzzlement. They witnessed a country and

its governments in chaos and conflict. They watched

the world’s wealthiest and most technologically

advanced nation unable or unwilling to respond quickly

with any semblance of coherence or effectiveness to the

deadliest threat to its people in a hundred years.

This failure of US governments to respond effectively

to the pandemic for so long highlighted deeper,

persistent, long-term governmental failures to address

a myriad of other serious problems that have faced the

country for decades.

Perhaps the most serious fundamental failure has been

its inability to address growing income inequality.

Over the last four decades, the U.S. has become

an increasingly unequal society. The share of the

top 10 percent “increased from 30-35 percent of

national income in the 1970s to 45-50% in the

2000s” (Piketty 2014, 295) and has shown no signs

of decreasing in the twenty-first century. “In 1980,

the top 1% of adults earned on average 27 times

more than the bottom 50% of adults before tax,

while they earn 81 times more today” (Piketty, Saez

and Zucman 2018, 553). The inequality of wealth

in the U.S. is even “greater today than it was at the

beginning of the nineteenth century” (Piketty 2014,

349–350) and is now greater than in most other

wealthy industrial countries (Kettl 2020, 80–81).

This rising inequality has exacerbated the historical

racial divide (Williams 2017). In 2019, the income

of white households was almost 60 percent higher

than that of black households and almost 30 percent

higher than Hispanic households. The poverty rate

for whites in 2019 was 7.3 percent, while for Blacks

it was 18.8 percent and for Hispanics, 15.7 percent.

There are also significant inequalities along age, gender,

education, and regional lines. In 2019, one in seven

children under the age of 18 was poor. One third of all

the poor people in the US are children. The poverty

rate among women (11.5 percent) was more than 20

percent higher than that of men (9.4 percent). The

poverty rates among individuals without a high school

diploma, 23.7 percent, was twice as high as those

with the diploma (11.5 percent), but six times higher

Reviewed by: Uday Desai

School of Public Administration, University of New Mexico

Galia Cohen, Editor

Book Reviews