The gap between the rich and the poor has grown dramatically in the United States and is now at its widest since at least the early 1900s. While by most measures the economy has been improving, soaring cost of living and stagnant wages have done little to assuage economic anxieties. Conditions like these seem designed to produce a generation-defining intervention to balance the economic scales and enhance opportunities for those at the middle and bottom of the country's economic ladder - but we have seen nothing of the sort. Nathan J. Kelly argues that a key reason for this is that rising concentrations of wealth create a politics that makes reducing economic inequality more difficult. Kelly convincingly shows that, when a small fraction of the people control most of the economic resources, they also hold a disproportionate amount of political power, hurtling us toward a self-perpetuating plutocracy, or an 'inequality trap'.

Also issued in print: 2020.

Frontmatter --CONTENTS -- ONE. Contemporary Politics and the Perpetuation of Inequality -- TWO. An Inescapable Plutocracy? -- THREE. Public Preferences and Economic Inequality -- FOUR. Elections and the Inequality Trap -- FIVE. Partisan Convergence and Financial Deregulation -- SIX. Polarization and Policy Stagnation -- SEVEN. Can We Escape the Trap? -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- INDEX.