I read this book in May, before the Occupy Wall Street Movement got started. For all I know this book influenced the movement. Hacker and Pierson carefully track how the 1% became the powerful mega-rich they are today. You should read this book and get angry. ( )

Published in 2010, the content is now somewhat dated. Nevertheless, the basic thesis of the back holds up well. The current political environment is closely related to that of 2010.

This is the story of the 0.1% and their near-total grasp of national politics, through Republican-for-a-day Democratic Senators and the incessant use of the filibuster when Obama was president. ( )

In the ugly and dishonest football game that is American politics, all eyes converge on the two teams endlessly facemasking and clotheslining each other; few ever look to the skyboxes for their owners. Over the past few decades the US has become an immensely unequal nation, and both economists and laypeople wonder if the growing wealth gap isn't slowing economic growth and hurting global competitiveness. It certainly seems like the American economy isn't the perpetual fountain of prosperity it used to be, and Hacker & Pierson trace the roots of current middle class stagnation to large, gradual trends that stem from the unique decade of the 1970s: capture of both parties by corporate interests, rollback/evisceration/irrelevance of laws and regulations for favored parties, the decline of labor unions, and near-total abandonment of the idea of the government as a guarantor of the public good. It's a depressingly fascinating story, told with lots of eye-opening statistics on the arrival of Latin American-style class immobility and polarization in a style that's engaging without losing sight of the facts. Conservatives might argue that this book has a liberal slant to it, but so far even the AEI/Heritage/Cato crew hasn't been able to explain away its findings, probably because the book spends so much time with such solid research analyzing step by step the slow but deep changes to American society over the years. The moral of the story, such as it is, is that when you couple organization and drive with knowledge of the levers of power, like the modern conservative movement has, even the public interest is no barrier. Additionally, you can't expect an economy to grow forever by concentrating rewards at the top and punishments at the bottom, although the spectacle of guilt-free TARP-funded Wall Street bonuses vs. the ongoing foreclosure nightmare shows that our elected officials have no qualms about continuing the status quo. Hacker and Pierson's appealingly transpartisan solution is more organization and public engagement by ordinary people, but I think that's easier said than done. Stranger things have happened in America, like the recent baffling burst of Tea Party fever, but I think that and a lot of other current events show that people would rather yell at each other than actually solve problems. A new wave of broad-based civic participation also unlikely because re-engaging people en mass in the disgusting business of politics would require exactly the kind of semi-permanent institutions that have been collapsing and being destroyed (see: ACORN) all over the country. Hopefully reversing these trends won't require another Depression or world war. ( )

This really should have been better. The content of the book is excellent however as is often the case with books written by academics, it was a dreary, repetitious read. It is part of the "beat the horse until it's dead" school of writing. Redundancy and self reference ("as we read in chapter three" blah blah). Too bad they didn't hire a good journalist/editor to hone their research into a more compelling narrative. Still the book's insights are useful, so it's worth a quick browse. ( )

If you're American, this book will make you angry, although the reasons may differ between individual readers. For me, it's because it puts facts and figures to suspicions I've long held. You can't just blame Reagan (which I often tended to do) for our wonky tax laws, the Federal debt, the budget deficit, our crumbling infrastructure, ridiculously expensive health care system, poor schools, income disparity, the decline of the middle class, lack of social mobility, or a host of other economic ills that were brought about by Reagan-omics (aka supply side economics, aka trickle-down economics, aka voodoo economics). It's much more complex than that. Sadly, there seems to be no easy remedy. ( )