Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class is a 2010 book by political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson. In it the authors argue that contrary to conventional wisdom, the dramatic increase in inequality of income in the United States since 1978—the richest 1% gaining 256% after inflation while the income of the lower earning 80% grew only 20%—is not the natural/inevitable result of increased competition from globalization, but of the work of political forces. Those at the very top of the economic ladder have developed and used political muscle to dramatically cut their taxes, deregulate the financial industry, and keep corporate governance lax and labor unions hamstrung. Instead of a rising tide lifting all boats, the authors write, "yachts are rising, but dinghies are largely staying put" in America, and "there is reason to suspect that the dinghies are staying put in part because the yachts are rising." Themes The authors quote a number of luminaries on the dangers of concentrated wealth and its incompatibility with good government—Theodore Roosevelt (p. 80), Louis Brandeis (p. 81-2), Alexis de Tocqueville (p. 77), the 1st-century Greek historian Plutarch (p. 75) ("An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics"), and even the father of the free market, Adam Smith (who warned of "great inequality" where "civil government" is "instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor") (p. 82). Increase in inequality Since the late 1970s, inequality of income in America has gotten worse across the board, but it is at the top where income has become most concentrated—concentrated at a level not seen since just before the Great Depression. Most of the gains of economic growth since the 1970s have gone to the top 1% of Americans, and most of that to the top 0.1%. While the share of America's income gains between 1979 and 2005 for the bottom middle- and lower-income 60% of the population was just 13.5% (and most of that gain came from working longer hours), the top 0.1% share was over 20%. In other words, the top 300,000 Americans gained half again as large a slice of income as the bottom 180 million. This after-tax distribution of income varies only slightly when factoring in non-cash compensation (such as health insurance and retirement pensions) distributed. Debunking the "educational cause" "Most economic