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The author longs for the civil-rights movement of his youth, and wants to relive it all over again, even if he has to fabricate one, and credits himself for sparking the Occupy Wall Street movement. For a good protest first you need a villain; Libya had its Muammar Gaddafi, and the author has his "the 1%" or "the bankers". The members of this cult-organization of super-villains are spoken about only in the vaguest of terms because the author seeks to dehumanize them as much as possible, otherwise readers might mistakenly empathize with the villains. All you need to know about them is that they are extremely rich, politically connected, and sucking money out of your pockets on a daily basis. There are plenty of wealthy movie-stars, politicians, and singers to go after, but CEOs and financiers are an easy target for the author; they make tons of money, and the average person has no clue what they do all day, so it is easy for the author to exploit the ignorance of his readers to foment hate. Having established the villain, we must now make the reader despise him. To do this the author appeals to the reader's sense of envy and injustice by contrasting the income and wealth of the villain against that of the reader. His favorite tools are "CEO / worker salary ratios", and "income distributions". Of course Executive compensation comes out of shareholder profits, not worker's salaries, and even if the CEO of Walmart's (for example) entire $18 million in salary and compensation were divided up evenly amongst Walmart's employees it would still amount to less than a penny per hour in wage increase. For "income distributions" you treat the entire country's GDP as a fixed pie, and then sort people by the percentage of the income they get. Now if you're familiar with the Pareto Principle, or 80-20 rule (*see: en.wikipedia (dot) org/wiki/Pareto_Principle) you know that these charts always have the same shape; the top 20% account for 80% of the effects. For example; in 19th century Italy 20% of the population owns 80% of the land, 20% of the movies earn 80% of the industry's profits, 20% of the books published account for 80% of book sales, 20% of the population makes 80% of the charitable donations, 20% of criminals commit 80% of the crimes, 20% of the global population controls 80% of the world's wealth, etc. This is a law of mathematics, similar to the Gaussian (normal) distribution. Also looking at a person's share of some GDP pie is irrelevant; what matter is how well (or poorly) they are doing in absolute dollar terms, such as by looking at median-incomes. Thus "income distributions" are meaningless... except as a political weapon. Of course the author, confident that most readers will not know this, trots out income and wealth distribution data in America, and to his "surprise" discovers that the top 20% control 80% of the income / wealth! Furthermore the top 20% of the top 20% (top 4%) control 80% * 80% = 64% of the wealth! Even worse, the top 20% of the top 20% of the top 20% (top 1%) control 80% * 80% * 80% = 51% of the wealth! This is shocking! (Actually it's more like 40% in America; wealth is slightly less concentrated than the Pareto Principle would predict.) Then the author talks about how terrible this is and how we need to change it... which makes as much sense as "discovering" that half of the children are below average, and complaining that if only we had better schools then every child would be above average. The author then assumes that (1) income is not merit; your income has little to do with how hard you work or how intelligent / skilled you are, and (2) income is zero-sum; the only way to increase your income is to take someone else's. Neither of these principles are stated or defended, but they pervade everything the author writes. Instead he uses cleverly deceptive weasel-words to trick you into accepting his worldview, for example; "...the top 1% seized more than 65% of the gain in total national income." How does the author know that those income-gains were "seized" rather than "earned" or "created"? He doesn't. So rich people "seize" their incomes at the "expense" of everyone else, whereas the average American is "given" his portion of the "economic-pie" and those with jobs are "more lucky" than their peers. Do you see what he's doing here yet? In his view, the rich are economic parasites whose existence is merely tolerable during good-times because their greedy profit-seeking has ancillary benefits for society as a whole. Comparing income-percentiles across time is not meaningful because income-percentiles are not some singular group. When comparing time periods you must use individuals, not groups. For example, if you are in the top 1% today, there is a 57% chance you will no longer be in the top 1% 10 years from now. While if you are in the bottom 20%, there is a 58% chance you will be in the top 80% within 10 years, and a 5% chance you will be in the top 20%. (Source: treasury (dot) gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/incomemobilitystudy03-08revise.pdf) His assertions that America has larger income differences, or that income-differences are growing more rapidly than Europe is false. The US's pre-tax income differences are comparable to that of France, and France's have grown much faster in the past 30 years. (Source: wikipedia (dot) org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality) His assertion that the safety net has been weakened is false; in America the population on disability and food-stamps is at an all-time high and rapidly growing. His assertion that the US has under-invested in education is false; college student-loan debt and enrollment is at an all-time high, the public spending per pupil in K-12 is at an all-time high and is higher than that of most other developed countries, though US schools rank much more poorly in terms of outcomes. His assertion that Microsoft has a monopoly on Operating Systems if false; their share is being quickly eroded by free-market forces. His assertion that rich-people generally get rich by extracting rents is false; there are a few exceptions, but by in large rich-people get rich by creating value. His assertion that discrimination, racism, and sexism account for wage-differences is false. The crux of the book is that there is a collective GDP pie which we all work together to produce, which "the 1%" take an unfair share of for themselves, hence the "inequality". But what if this analogy is wrong? What if a better analogy would be that every individual bakes his own pie, with more skilled and hard-working individuals producing pies thousands of times larger than anyone else, and then charitably sharing them with the less fortunate? Talking about "your share" of some "collective GDP pie", as if it were some sort of thing that falls from the heavens absent any human effort, is deliberately misleading. All that matters is (1) how well off the poorest are, (2) how well off the average person is, and (3) how much opportunity for income mobility there is. There are very real problems with America's economy today, as correctly pointed out in this book's later chapters, such as the US's large trade-deficit and the Federal Reserve's poor monetary policy, but unfortunately the author is too blinded by his ideology. He always tries to fit everything into his conspiracy-theory storyline about how the rich are robbing the poor, thus his explanation for why these problems are occurring, or how to fix them, are completely wrong. The problem is not rich people or markets; it is the government's interference in markets. The author strongly supports heavy government-intervention in the economy, and wants more of it, but then opines the corruption that inevitably results. A powerful government is a corrupt government. The author seems to believe that if we all just protest enough and elect the right people, then we can finally have a government that is run for the average American rather than special interest groups. This isn't true. It will never happen. Lobbyists and special interest groups will ALWAYS be better informed, better motivated, and better organized than the average voter when it comes to specific issues that affect them. They will always run the show behind the curtain. Politicians make decisions based on politics, not economics. What matters most is retaining political power; everything else is a means to that end. And any politician who thinks otherwise will inevitably lose to a less scrupulous politician; it's a Darwinian game of "survival of the least scrupulous." If capitalism is a system in which people pursuing their own self-interest work together for the greater good of society, then politics is a system in which people pursuing their own self-interest wage war and inevitably destroy society in a negative-sum game. If you're upset about favor-buying, don't get mad at the people buying it, get mad at the people selling it! Because politics is inherently corrupt, we need to limit the power of politicians, rather than expand the reach and power of politics as the author repeatedly advocates. The solution is to have (1) a limited government that confines itself to providing public goods, welfare, and correcting for market failures, (2) respecting the separation of state and commerce, and (3) a stable money supply. A government that cannot interfere in the economy is a government that cannot hand out subsidies; special-interest groups can't buy influence if the politicians have nothing to sell. The author doesn't oppose government-subsidies; he just disagrees with where they are currently being directed. Subsidizing oil-companies and bailing out investment banks is wrong, but presumably subsidizing solar-energy companies and bailing out General Motors is fine. I wonder; if Goldman Sachs was unionized and went bankrupt making risky bets on failed solar-energy companies, would the author have been happy about bailing it out? The US government has pursued economic policies that have resulted in impoverishing the average American. The author is eager to work this into his conspiracy-theory and claim it is all part of a global plot by "the 1%" to benefit itself. In reality there is no such conspiracy; politicians pursue such policies because politicians subscribe to the same Keynesian economic policies that the author himself advocates; (1) The government has pursued a policy of artificially increasing the price of homes. This does not create wealth; it merely transfers wealth from buyers to sellers, from future-owners to current-owners. If the price of every home fell to $1, this would be a great boom for the economy as everyone could then own their own home and pay off their current mortgage. The extra income no longer spent on rent or mortgage-payments could then be spent on discretionary income. Yet the author falls for the myth that falling home prices are bad. (2) The Federal Reserve has pursued an inflationary monetary-policy that has raised asset prices while reducing inflation-adjusted wages. This is why the stock-market is up while wages are down. What improvements there have been in the US's economic-barometers are a result of this policy, though the author buys into the myth that the US is undergoing a real (though "unequal") recovery. Even worse, the author advocates for higher inflation rates! (3) The US government has misallocated capital by punishing savers while rewarding debtors. Their low-interest rate policies and tax-codes are designed to encourage immediate consumption funded by debt at the expense of saving. How can the average Americans hope to build up their own safety-net of savings if real-interest rates are negative and the value of their wages is being eroded due to inflation? (4) The US government has saddled students with massive debts by encouraging them to borrow heavily to acquire overpriced and largely worthless college degrees. I have talked to several college-majors who are now getting minimum wage working at Subway. Meanwhile small-businesses have a hard time getting loans. For example, when Daymond John, the creator of FUBU and now a multi-millionaire, originally wanted to start a business his loan-application was denied by 29 different banks before he finally had to mortgage his own mother's home to get the money. Yet the author claims we have "underinvested" in education. (5) Obamacare's employer-mandate and tax-loopholes that let you get your healthcare from your employer tax-free have tied the high-costs of healthcare to an employee's wages, making American labor internationally uncompetitive. In summary, skip this book and read one a book written by the economist Thomas Sowell or Milton Friedman instead. You can thank me later.