Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [68]
The first work to make this point powerfully and clearly was by Princeton professor Larry Bartels. In a study of the correlation between U.S. Senate roll call votes and an index by Poole and Rosenthal designed to measure the ideological position of members across multiple dimensions,91 Bartels concludes that “[i]n almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”92
Princeton professor Martin Gilens extended Bartels’s analysis substantially by examining about 1,781 national survey questions between 1981 and 2002.93 These questions asked whether the respondent supported or opposed some particular change in U.S. policy, and then tracked whether in fact those changes occurred. Looking at all the survey questions, Gilens was able to demonstrate a significant difference between the likelihood that a measure would be enacted if the rich supported it and the likelihood when the middle class or poor supported it.
More striking was the comparison when looking at the subset of questions where the highest income group differed substantially in their views from the lowest (n = 887) and where the highest differed substantially in their views from the middle-income group (n = 498). What Gilens found here was amazing: while policymakers were responsive to the increasingly strong preferences of the highest-income groups (the more of whom supported a policy, the more likely it was to be passed), there was a “complete lack of government responsiveness to the preferences of the poor”94 (meaning increasing support among the poor for a particular policy did not increase the likelihood of its passage). And middle-income voters “fare little better than the poor.”95
This rather stark conclusion is the whole subject of Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s powerful book Winner-Take-All Politics (2010). Hacker and Pierson frame their account by distinguishing between two kinds of societies, Broadland and Richistan. In Broadland, all income groups across some period of time are doing better, even if not necessarily at the same pace. In Richistan, only the very rich do better across that same period of time. The rest of society is either just holding on or falling behind.
Until about 1972 the United States, Hacker and Pierson argue, was Broadland. We then became Richistan. And not just in some slight or statistically meaningless sense, but instead, in as gross and extreme a sense as any comparable nation in the world.
Indeed, the best comparison to where we are today is not any other nation in the world, but rather to when we were on the cusp of the Depression. In 2007 the richest 1 percent of families were within a point of matching the share of income that the top 1 percent had in 1928.
These numbers are hard to make real, but here’s a way to visualize them (Figure 12).
FIGURE 12
Between 2001 and 2006, the total income of all Americans added together grew. But it didn’t grow proportionately. Not even close. For every dollar of added income, fifty-three cents of that dollar went to the top 1 percent of American households.96
It’s even worse if you think about the top one-tenth of 1 percent (0.1 percent): for income gains between 1979 and 2005, the top 0.1 percent received over 20 percent of all gains, while the bottom 60 percent received only 13.5 percent (Figure 13).97
FIGURE 13
In constant dollars, the average income of the top 0.1 percent (including capital gains) in 2007 was more than