The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

there are incentives for firms to work to reduce market competition.

The top 1 percent get in one week 40 percent more than the bottom fifth receive in a year; the top 0.1 percent received in a day and a half about what the bottom 90 percent received in a year; and the richest 20 percent of income earners earn in total after tax more than the bottom 80 percent combined.

Some thirty years ago, the top 1 percent of income earners received only 12 percent of the nation’s income.

after a slight dip in 2008, the ratio of CEO annual compensation to that of the typical worker by 2010 was back to what it had been before the crisis, to 243 to 1.

the gains of the “recovery” since the recession have accrued overwhelmingly to the wealthiest Americans: the top 1 percent of Americans gained 93 percent of the additional income created in the country in 2010, as compared with 2009

We are, in fact, paying a high price for our growing and outsize inequality: not only slower growth and lower GDP but even more instability. And this is not to say anything about the other prices we are paying: a weakened democracy, a diminished sense of fairness and justice, and even, as I have suggested, a questioning of our sense of identity.

For markets to work the way markets are supposed to, there has to be appropriate government regulation. But for that to occur, we have to have a democracy that reflects the general interests—not the special interests or just those at the top.

A political system that amplifies the voice of the wealthy provides ample opportunity for laws and regulations—and the administration of them—to be designed in ways that not only fail to protect the ordinary citizens against the wealthy but also further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the rest of society.

Rather than correcting the market’s failures, the political system was reinforcing them.

it seems that the political system is more akin to “one dollar one vote” than to “one person one vote.”