Inequality, U.S.A.
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. By Kevin Phillips. Broadway, 473 pp., $29.95.
The argument of Kevin Phillips’s provocative and disturbing new book could almost be rendered as a cliché: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. According to Phillips, the very rich in the U.S. have gotten much richer over the past two decades while virtually everyone else has gotten a good deal poorer, despite the widely publicized financial gains of the 1980s and ’90s.