Sam Petulla talks with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson about their new book on income disparity and how Washington has abandoned the middle.
Matt Yglesias criticized the book, saying that there may not be as strong a link between stagnating middle-class wages and inequality as you would have us believe. Your thoughts?
JH: I think it’s wrong to think that the stagnation of middle incomes is separate from rising inequality. From a simple mathematical perspective, the fact that over the 1979 to 2007 period almost 40 percent of after-tax income benefit gains have gone to the richest one percent of Americans can’t but have an impact on the rest of society, as we show in the book. Essentially, no one below the top 90 percent has experienced household income gains commensurate with the average growth of household income over this period, and a lot of other scholars have shown that productivity gains have been strong, but that they have not gone to the middle.
