Stiglitz and Winner Take All Economics

Last week's Vanity Fair article by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz reminds us that while most of the world struggles to rebuild in the wake of the financial meltdown two years ago, things have never been better for the folks who brought us this clusterfuck. Channelling Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker's Winner Take All Politics,  he reminds us that the top .1% of U.S. households now command almost a quarter of all income, a staggering maldistribution of wealth not seen since the late 1920s.

And in case you thought this was just another uniquely American disaster, things are much the same in our peaceable kingdom, where almost all of the income growth of the past decades has accrued to the same .1% of the population. And as Stiglitz notes, this warps far more than economic outcomes, as

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real.

 More important, in this Darwinian struggle where only those at the top prosper, our sense of solidarity forged in the the economic catastrophe of eighty years ago is utterly lost. We have a bit more materially, but we are so much less.