Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

And the problem isn’t just the spectacle of enormous wealth and the gratuitous economic inequality and insecurity. It’s also the corruption of our system of government, ruining democracy. Beginning in the 1980s, big business and the rich achieved the political power to tilt our system—legislatures, executive branches, judiciaries, media, academia—much more in their favor. Thus they become even richer, which permitted them to buy more political leverage to tilt the system more excessively, further entrenching their wealth and political power. And so on and on. As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it, we’re “converting higher economic inequality into greater political inequality. Political inequality, in its turn, gives rise to more economic inequality.” It’s another cascading vicious cycle, maybe the most disturbing of all.