The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor Highlight

I was born in 1979. Ronald Reagan took office when I was just a few months old. The biggest story of my lifetime is that the rich have gotten richer, and the rest of us haven’t. Another way to say this is that, since 1980, the hourly compensation of the average American worker has stayed almost flat, even as their productivity has risen by 75 percent. During that same time, the share of national wealth held by the top 0.00001 percent of American earners—the richest of the rich—has increased by 1,000 percent.