Concentration and commodification: the political economy of postindustrialism in America and beyond

In the past decades, two features of the American political economy have been at the heart of policy and political debates – growing income inequality and growing regional inequality. The period since the 1980s witnessed a dramatic reversal in the postwar fall in inequality, with a rising of share of income earned by the wealthiest Americans (Piketty and Saez 2003). Before taxes and transfers, the incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans now constitute over 20 percent of total income, with close to half of all income earned by the top 10 percent of earners.