Is Inequality in America Irreversible?

We are living in a time of extreme inequality, and few places are more unequal than the United States. America's 20 richest people now own more wealth than the bottom half of the rest of the population combined. Although there's a growing realization that this is grotesque, many politicians accept it as irreversible. In this book, leading US scholar and activist Chuck Collins succinctly diagnoses the causes and drivers of rampant inequality, and demolishes simplistic theories that hold that current inequalities are primarily the result of technological change and globalization or differences in merit. He argues that these inequalities have their roots in forty years of the powerful and wealthy rigging the entire system in their favor. He proposes a wide range of public policies to roll back decades of accelerating inequality, analyses the barriers to progress, and shows how transformative local campaigns can be made into a national movement for change. This book is a powerful analysis of how the plutocracy sold us a toxic and damaging lie, and what we can do to fight back.