Divested: Inequality in Financialized America
Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely
Abstract
Finance is an inescapable part of American life. From how one pursues an education, buys a home, runs a business, or saves for retirement, finance orders the lives of ordinary Americans. And as finance continues to expand, inequality soars. This book demonstrates why widening inequality cannot be understood without examining the rise of finance. The growth of the financial sector has dramatically transformed the American economy by redistributing resources from workers and families into the hands of owners, executives, and financial professionals. The average American is now divested from a wo ... More
Finance is an inescapable part of American life. From how one pursues an education, buys a home, runs a business, or saves for retirement, finance orders the lives of ordinary Americans. And as finance continues to expand, inequality soars. This book demonstrates why widening inequality cannot be understood without examining the rise of finance. The growth of the financial sector has dramatically transformed the American economy by redistributing resources from workers and families into the hands of owners, executives, and financial professionals. The average American is now divested from a world driven by the maximization of financial profit. The book provides systematic evidence to document how the ascendance of finance on Wall Street, Main Street, and among households is a fundamental cause of economic inequality. It argues that finance has reshaped the economy in three important ways. First, the financial sector extracts resources from the economy at large without providing commensurate economic benefit to those outside the financial services industry. Second, firms in other economic sectors have become increasingly involved in lending and speculative investing, which weakens the demand for labor and the bargaining power of workers. And third, the shift of risks and uncertainties once shouldered by unions, corporations, and governments onto families escalates the consumption of financial products, which in turns exacerbates wealth inequality.
Keywords:
finance,
inequality,
financial sector,
American economy,
financial profit,
financial product,
financial service
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190638313 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: February 2020 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190638313.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Ken-Hou Lin, author
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin
Megan Tobias Neely, author
Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
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