The steelworker’s math
In 1970, a steelworker in Youngstown earned enough to buy a house, send two kids to college, and retire with a pension. He needed a union card and forty hours. By 2024, the plant was gone, the pension was gone, and a family in the same zip code paid $1,200 a month for daycare — a cost that barely existed in 1970 because one income covered a household.
We do not find wealth concentration mysterious. Capital accumulates. Thomas Piketty put it on a bumper sticker: r > g. The rate of return on capital exceeds economic growth, which means the share flowing to owners grows faster than the share flowing to workers until someone intervenes or the system collapses.
The intervention happened once. Between 1935 and 1975, strong unions, progressive taxation above 70 percent, and public investment produced the broadest shared prosperity in American history. Then it was dismantled — by political choices funded by the people those choices enriched. The Powell Memo of 1971 was a literal blueprint for corporate capture. Heritage Foundation, ALEC, Cato — all founded within six years. By 1981, Reagan was cutting the top rate from 70 to 28.
The Chicago school calls this deregulation. Union membership dropped from 35 to 10 percent — not because workers stopped wanting unions, but because the terrain was tilted. Every factory moved to Shenzhen was a threat made flesh to every worker in Michigan.
The Austrian school blames the Fed, and on monetary expansion as wealth transfer, they are closer to us than either side is comfortable admitting. We differ on the remedy. They want to remove the state from money. We want to remove money from the state.
Where we concede ground: Scandinavia operates within capitalism and maintains Gini coefficients half that of the US. The erosion we predicted has been slow.
What would change our mind: A wealth tax, 30-percent union density, and closed loopholes still leaving the top 1 percent above 25 percent after a decade.
Read the full synthesis: Why does wealth keep concentrating?