(Here is the introduction to the book as of 12.1.2024)
This book was written specifically for the non-specialist reader, the proverbial general reader. Hopefully, it provides an accessible introduction to how America has become what it is today.
This book focuses on changes in American life over the past 50 years, particularly those that have driven a significant increase in income and wealth inequality and intensified insecurities for most Americans.
The story is presented in three parts:
- Part 1 – the $47 trillion heist of income by the top 10% of the population starting in 1979 and continuing to this day.
- the political coalition that brought this about
- the structural and regulatory changes in the economy that drove the heist
- the intensification of insecurities for the bottom 90%
- Part 2 – other troubling features of capitalism
- Part 3 – summary and looking forward
In Part 1 – the $47 trillion heist, the book describes how, despite the rising productivity1 of the economy, the average worker experienced only a 14% increase in real income over the last 45 years. In contrast, the top 10% of the population received over $47 trillion in increased income during the same period. For the top 1%, this amounted to an increase of over 300% in real terms.
Part 1 continues to describe the political forces that changed government policies, laws, and regulations to create the conditions for this enormous heist of income and, consequently, wealth. These changes led to three key drivers of the $47 trillion heist: market concentration (monopolization), globalization and the decline of unions, and the financialization of the economy. This last driver is the shift from a focus on the production of goods and services to maximizing the extraction of money from economic activities. Finally, Part 1 describes the intensified and broadened range of insecurities produced by capitalism. These have come to characterize the lives of the bottom 90% of the population over the past 50 years.
Part 2 – Other Features of Capitalism opens by discussing why orthodox economics is not helpful in understanding our situation. It then provides a definition of capitalism and a new definition of what we would like a sustainable and equitable economy to accomplish. The bulk of Part 2 reviews many other troubling features of our capitalist system. These features are important to understand, as they are central to our ongoing crises of environmental degradation and the exhaustion of the earth.
In Part 3 – Summary and Looking Forward, we summarize the discussion of the $47 trillion heist. Then, we take a look at some progressive policies that would ameliorate much of the income and wealth inequality produced by capitalism and consequently reduce the burden of insecurities for most of the population. Taking a longer view, the book concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the capitalist system that might respond more profoundly to the twin problems of environmental change and the exhaustion of the earth.
Before we begin our exploration, there are four issues to note. First, it is very difficult for humans to accurately track changes that occur over long periods of time. We evolved to be very aware of immediate changes that signal danger or opportunity, but our long-term perceptions and memories are quite unreliable.
Second, compounding this is the data we use to measure and discuss our economic and social lives. Even the seemingly most obvious metrics, like Gross Domestic Product (GDP), average or median wages, or inflation, are doubly fraught with troubles with how the data is gathered and arguments over what they actually measure.
Third, almost all economic and social data is represented by numbers. We are pretty good at single-digit numbers; we can look at our fingers for those. But when the numbers have six, nine, and twelve zeros after them (millions, billions, trillions), most of us have no concrete sense of what they mean.
Fourth, despite the cultural rhetoric around our economy, capitalism is not a self-regulating natural system; it is entirely the creation of human beings.