Unnatural selection: how a politically rigged economic system has been sold to Americans as a force of nature.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

Simon & Schuster, 368 pp.

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In their very influential 2006 book, Off Center, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson conducted a persuasive analysis of the dynamics by which conservative theorists and practitioners pulled the Republican Party and then the terms of national debate to the right. Now the duo is back, with a complex analysis of how the U.S. economic system has also moved "off center" toward an extreme concentration of wealth, and how progressive efforts to reverse that trend have run aground against a variety of institutional and political obstacles.

Framed as a "detective story" about how the economy has arrived at the current juncture, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class begins by elucidating trends in the distribution of total income over the last thirty years, in absolute terms and as compared to other wealthy countries, and focusing on the truly rich: the top 1 percent of Americans. This section also forcefully argues that income distribution is not some sort of "natural" phenomenon that government sometimes counteracts (at the cost, we are usually told, of inefficiency), but the product of government policies themselves:

There are no pre-political markets. Markets are inevitably shaped and channeled by political forces, dependent on the rules that are set up and enforced by those who control the coercive power of the state. The laissez-faire vision of the economy held up in the Supreme Court's 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York [a case that gave its name to an era in which the Supreme Court abrogated a slew of Progressive Era workplace reforms] was a political choice, one with distinct, sometimes brutal consequences, and one that required a great deal of government intervention to emerge and survive. Hacker and Pierson apply the same principle to the belief, common among Democrats and Republicans alike, that contemporary income inequality is the result of a globalized economy in which education and skills levels are the great dividers. While acknowledging that these assets matter, they stress that the vast majority of Americans who have been losing ground to the super-rich for decades include many well-educated people, and in many respects it is government policies that both promote...