Forum Post: Book Review: "Winner-Take-All Politics"

I have written another book review, this time on Jacob hacker and Paul Pierson's "Winner-Take-All Politics". You can find it at: http://387442890115614373.weebly.com/

From my review:

"The Introduction describes what is basically the underlying idea of the entire book. They describe what they call “The Thirty Year War” in which federal policy has been used to ensure that the rewards of economic growth have been hyper-concentrated at the top of the socio-economic scale. For example, since 1979 the top one percent accounted for almost three times as much growth in income as the bottom sixty percent (remember that the benefit to the rich is divided among far fewer individuals than that to the rest of us)....

...Their conclusionary chapter, “Beating Winner-Take-All” is the most disappointing. Hacker and Pierson are much better at describing what has gone wrong than they are at making recommendations regarding what to do about it. Nevertheless, their well-documented and clearly written diagnosis of what has gone wrong will be extremely valuable to those who are currently agitating for change. Anyone who may want to develop a vision for the future would do well to carefully read this book. In particular, their admonition to attend to three specific issues- reducing the capacity of elites to block change, promoting greater mass participation in the political process, and developing new groups to organize voters and lobby the Congress, are well taken. "