I had the opportunity to see Tim Noah speak last night about his
new book The Great Divergence. It’s a book-length version of his
Slate series on the rise of income inequality since 1979, and
I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot different in the book,
other than it’s in print rather than on a website or in a PDF,
and that there’s a “solutions” chapter that Noah worked hard
last night to disclaim (although he did the right thing by
assembling solutions that would actually work, rather than
solutions that were politically feasible at the present time).
Noah basically attributes the growth of income inequality since
1979, a time frame in which it has doubled, to the decline of
the labor movement, a modicum of structural and technological
factors, and the rise of Big Finance and runaway executive
compensation. One audience member asked whether the massive
reduction in tax rates contributed to this. After all, the
timing lines up pretty well: in 1981, Ronald Reagan took the top
marginal tax rate from 70% to 28%,