Analysis Of Winner-Take-All Politics By Jacob S. Hacker And Paul Pierson

In the book, Winner-Take-All Politics, the authors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson take a look at how over the last half a century the economy of the United States has become skewed to benefit the richest of the rich in the country. They treat the problem as if they were solving a crime, referring to the information and data they collect as DNA evidence or clues, and run through a list of prime suspects (13). They describe how others have interpreted the facts, and come up with different conclusions or how they have missed important evidence that would dramatically change the way they saw the crime, of how America became a winner take all economy. In order to understand how Hacker and Pierson have come to their prime suspect for the cause of this economic imbalance you must understand how they define …show more content…
They describe the winner take all economy to be one where the majority of the wealth and economic windfall accumulate at the top rung of the economic ladder instead of being evenly distributed across all the rungs. Where the top .01 percent of the rich, or super rich, are the ones with the most gains and the rest of the country makes modest improvements, sits stagnant, or is poised for losses. Truly the winners take all. How did this happen in the U.S. when other wealthy economies around the world did not have this dramatic shift? Hacker and Pierson place the government and American politics as the primary suspect for this transition to a “winner-take-all economy”. They assert that the way the government treated unions, the excessive salaries and perks of company executives, and lack of government regulation and taxation as the primary causes of the dramatic shift to the winners having it all in America (Hacker and