Open thread for night owls: Have corporations convinced us deep inequality is a good thing?

At Rolling Stone, Jared Bernstein interviewed Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz about his new book, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Here is an excerpt:

Talk more about the political impact. How do you see inequality undermining our democracy?

High levels of economic inequality lead to imbalances in political power as those at the top use their economic weight to shape our politics in ways that give them more economic power. If you look at so many of the outcomes in our political process, no one can say that they reflect the interests of most Americans. Most Americans don't think speculators should be taxed at a fraction of people that work for a living; or that banks should be allowed to engage in predatory lending or abusive credit card practices; or that drug companies be allowed to get special benefits out of the government in the form of overpayments; or that mining companies should be able to get natural resources at below competitive prices.

At the top [of the income scale], a lot of the inequality arises out of efforts that people take to get a larger share of the pie rather than to increase the size of the pie. As you know, economists call it 'rent seeking.' What they're doing is moving money from the bottom to the top. But they're not creating wealth; they're just shifting wealth around. And the people who have been exploited are not better off; in fact, they're worse off.

All of which breeds disillusionment.

Right. I was really struck that in the 2010 election only about 20 percent of young people bothered to vote. And that was an indication that in their mind politics doesn't matter. No matter who won, the outcome was going to be determined by the people at the top, and so why bother to vote? Even worse, disillusionment only reinforces the power of money.

Why don't more people recognize these inequities?

One of the reasons, I suggest in the book, is that our views on these issues have really been shaped. Corporations learned how to sell almost anything. An example that makes that clear is how the cigarette companies sold so many Americans on the idea that there was no credible evidence that cigarette smoking was bad for your health.

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