winners take all the elite charade of changing the world

Claiming tax deductions for private jets when so many people can’t afford daycare is an example of a rigged system.

And this is where you see people making private, bottle-service public policy – that is, policy that has almost no public benefit other than to make society work well for the wealthy. Most of the graphs you pick up show a pretty significant spike in inequality and capture when you start getting into the 1% or. However, this isn’t where I think the heart of the problem is located. If you cut it that way – at 20%, for instance – then we’re talking about an upper-middle-class secession from American life brought on by policies like the mortgage tax credit, property tax as the method of funding public schools, and Nimby housing policies. It is absolutely a problem that the top 20-25% of America has done well while the bottom 75-80% rest has not. And depending on where you cut it, the nature of the problem – the nature of the crime – is slightly different. I think there are a lot of different ways to cut the definition of “ruling class”. And so I am interested to hear a bit more about why you chose to include the term “elite” in the title of your book as opposed to, say, “ruling class” or “plutocrat ”? How do these linguistic choices reflect your analysis of the problem?

One of the most important arguments you present in Winners Take All is that the commonsense language we unwittingly or reflexively employ with respect to social transformation often prevents us from expanding the parameters of acceptable debate.

Winners take all the elite charade of changing the world