Concentration and Commodification: The Political Economy of Postindustrialism in America and Beyond

Abstract

In the past decades, two features of the American political economy have been at the heart of policy and political debates growing income inequality and growing regional inequality. The period since the 1980s witnessed a dramatic reversal in the post-war fall in inequality, with a rising of share of income earned by the wealthiest Americans (Piketty and Saez 2003). Before taxes and transfers, the incomes of the top 1% of American now constitute over 20% of total income, with close to half of all income earned by the top 10% of earners.1 Inequalities in income mirror inequalities in other domains: education, health, and happiness (Case and Deaton 2015).