Uncovering Capitalism – the actual workings is an exploration of how American capitalism produces significant insecurities and large income and wealth inequalities for 90 percent of the population. This is a look back over the past 50 years to see how the rich and corporations in league with the American political conservative movement have transformed American life. The most obvious indicator is the fact that labor productivity ($s of output per $ of labor) increased by over 60% during this period, while average wages only rose by 14%.
For example, if the income trends that characterized the period from the end of WWII to 1975 had continued through the past 50 years, a worker at the middle of the population would have earned $92,000 in 2018 instead of the $50,000 actually earned.1
This decoupling of wages and productivity produced a transfer of over 47 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 10%, with the vast majority of that income ending up in the hands of the top 1%. The book seeks to explain how this happened.
Building on economic ideas calling for free markets, low or no regulation, and small government, American conservatives mobilized the racist, nativist, anti-immigrant, and Protestant fundamentalist religious tendencies embedded in American culture to push this economic agenda forward. 
The book explores the surge in ownership concentration in virtually every market, resulting in a handful of large corporations dominating. This occurred because the new conservative politics ended longstanding government policies of anti-trust enforcement that dated back to the turn of the 20th century. This new wave of monopolization crushed competition, stifled unions, and lowered wages for workers and payments to suppliers while suppressing competitors and innovation. The globalization of the world economy accompanied these changes. This produced a mass export of US jobs by American corporations, mainly to China and Mexico, in search of the lowest-wage workers possible.
Accompanying these changes was the deregulation of the finance industry and a shift in corporate objectives from producing goods and services to extracting as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time. These changes have swelled the bank accounts of top corporate managers so that the ratio between CEO to worker pay has risen from 25 to 1 in the 1960s to over 350 to 1 today. In addition, regulation changes created a whole new method of extracting money from corporations: stock buybacks. This created a multi-trillion-dollar transfer of corporate profits into the hands of shareholders and top management.
This has created a landscape of intensified insecurities for the bottom 90% of Americans. Jobs, housing, healthcare, food, education, family life, mental health, transportation, the environment, retirement, and more have become significantly more troubled than at the beginning of this 50-year period. This brief review examines each of these insecurities.
Beyond this story of the $47 trillion heist, the book explores many other features of American capitalism and capitalism in general. Particular attention is paid to the finance sector and its rampant speculation and instabilities.
The book does not pose solutions. Its contribution is to a clearer understanding of where we are now.
Footnotes
- Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018” (RAND Corporation, September 14, 2020), https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html.