McVeigh, Rory, William Carbonaro, Chang Liu and Kenadi Silcox. 2025. Politics and Privilege: How the Status Wars Sustain Inequality: Columbia University Press.

In the United States, the bottom 50 percent of households hold only 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. Scholars and commentators have long viewed democracy as the antidote to economic inequality, but US electoral politics bears little resemblance to a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. What makes extreme disparities of wealth and income so persistent, and why has the political process failed to address the problem?