Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich

by Kevin Phillips

List Price:	~~$17.95~~
Amazon Price:	$12.21 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.
You Save:	$5.74 (32%)
Average Rating:
Lowest New Price:	$10.71
Availablitiy:	Usually ships in 24 hours

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
For more than thirty years, Kevin Phillips' insight into American politics and economics has helped to make history as well as record it. His bestselling books, including The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) and The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), have influenced presidential campaigns and changed the way America sees itself. Widely acknowledging Phillips as one of the nation's most perceptive thinkers, reviewers have called him a latter-day Nostradamus and our "modern Thomas Paine." Now, in the first major book of its kind since the 1930s, he turns his attention to the United States' history of great wealth and power, a sweeping cavalcade from the American Revolution to what he calls "the Second Gilded Age" at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The Second Gilded Age has been staggering enough in its concentration of wealth to dwarf the original Gilded Age a hundred years earlier. However, the tech crash and then the horrible events of September 11, 2001, pointed out that great riches are as vulnerable as they have ever been. In Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips charts the ongoing American saga of great wealth–how it has been accumulated, its shifting sources, and its ups and downs over more than two centuries. He explores how the rich and politically powerful have frequently worked together to create or perpetuate privilege, often at the expense of the national interest and usually at the expense of the middle and lower classes.

With intriguing chapters on history and bold analysis of present-day America, Phillips illuminates the dangerous politics that go with excessive concentration of wealth. Profiling wealthy Americans–from Astor to Carnegie and Rockefeller to contemporary wealth holders–Phillips provides fascinating details about the peculiarly American ways of becoming and staying a multimillionaire. He exposes the subtle corruption spawned by a money culture and financial power, evident in economic philosophy, tax favoritism, and selective bailouts in the name of free enterprise, economic stimulus, and national security.

Finally, Wealth and Democracy turns to the history of Britain and other leading world economic powers to examine the symptoms that signaled their declines–speculative finance, mounting international debt, record wealth, income polarization, and disgruntled politics–signs that we recognize in America at the start of the twenty-first century. In a time of national crisis, Phillips worries that the growing parallels suggest the tide may already be turning for us all.

From the Hardcover edition.

Amazon.com Review
Most American conservatives take it as an article of faith that the less governmental involvement in affairs of the market and pocketbook the better. The rich do not, whatever they might say--for much of their wealth comes from the "power and preferment of government." So writes Kevin Phillips, the accomplished historian and one-time Washington insider, in this extraordinary survey of plutocracy, excess, and reform. "Laissez-faire is a pretense," he argues; as the wealth of the rich has grown, so has its control over government, making politics a hostage of money. Examining cycles of economic growth and decline from the founding days of the republic to the recent collapse of technology stocks, Phillips dispels notions of trickle-down wealth creation, pricks holes in speculative bubbles, and decries the ever-increasing "financialization" of the economy--all of which, he argues, have served to reduce the well-being of ordinary Americans and government alike. Highly readable for all its charts and graphs, Phillips's book offers a refreshing--and, of course, controversial--blend of economic history and social criticism. His conclusions won't please all readers, but just about everyone who comes to his pages will feel hackles rising. --Gregory McNamee

Customers who bought this item also bought

All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3 out of 5 stars

important issues, terrible writing, 2008-08-04
This book has been a slow read due to the author's disorganized writing and liberal use of big words for no apparent reason. It's typical of him to mention some phenomenon and then say, but we'll get back to that later. Or he'll say, we've already covered most of this in chapter 4 and table 2.1 but let me add... It's a total mess.

That said, the concepts are interesting, and I think Obama's popularity is a sign that most Americans are getting tired of footing the bill for the mistakes of the wealthy. The most interesting things i've read in this book:

- since the 80's, the US has seen the socialization of financial risk and privatization of risks that every person has (ie the risk of falling ill).
- laissez-faire is an illusion.
- the top individual tax bracket once paid 90% income tax
- the top individual tax bracket now pays about the same as the middle class (or less if the person is "savvy")
- Lincoln (republican) once said: "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration."
- capital has no country

I have not and may not finish reading this book because the prose is so tedious, but 100 pages from the end I have not encountered any mention of the Long Term Capital fiasco that also ended with a taxpayer bailout.

I am an entrepreneur and believe that capitalism is the only way to run economies/markets. However, my experience of over 5 years living in a country with a gini index of 55 has made clear the disadvantages of wealth disparity, even on purely pragmatic terms. Americans, inheritors of the first modern democracy, should do what they can to ensure the powerful do not continue to accumulate disproportionate wealth and power. The United States gini is already at 40.8, the highest since the 60's when the coefficient was first measured. It's also the highest/worst among developed countries and more typical of countries like Senegal and Turkmenistan.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 stars

Interesting, hard to read with so much data, , 2008-01-25
i read the first hundred pages and became bogged down. After a couple years I ran out of current reading and picked up where I'd left off. It's reading much faster now - and I'm about 3/4 done. I add this review only because I am recommending the book to another, and I was here, so ....

The book is full of facts and figures to the point it will overwhelm you, but it seems pretty well researched. I sense the author has told this same story many different ways in many different books .. but the basic premise is solid.

Here's a thought: How are you doing in the stock market? Well? Great .. but keep in mind that the really good analysists - those with the Fed Chairman on speed-dial - don't work for the everyday guy, or even Goldman Sacks .. it's like tequila: the really good stuff never gets shared with the public.

The book is about that, and while getting off your duff and taking advantage of opportunites is the best thing to do .. there are some with advantages you can only dream about, and they make sure their cream is skimmed before passing the bottle to you.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars

The true history of the lifestyles of the rich and infamous, 2007-12-20
If you want a true, accurate, and honest account about how the rich keep getting (not just) rich, and powerful too, read this book.

Conservatives might simply dismiss this as another example of the dreaded "class warfare" they hammer about on Fox News. But this account of the rich and powerful doesn't come from a liberal. It comes from a CONSERVATIVE (and one who served both Reagan and Bush I).

His in depth analysis and his biting commentary about examining his own class of people make this a must read for anyone (left or right) who wants to better understand the rich and powerful...and how they got that way.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars

is there any democracy left for the rest of us?, 2007-08-20
The American experiment in democracy has degenerated into a plutocracy, in which wealth and power preempt democracy's ideals of equality and freedom [cf Kevin Phillips' Wealth & Democracy]. While Phillips gives a depressing history of the decline, and its corruption thru the centuries, Cadillac Desert focuses on perhaps the biggest corrupter of all - the sprawling water projects of the American West, in which water is diverted at huge cost to grow crops no one needs, all to support giant corporations that threaten to wipe out the family farms that were the rationale for the projects in the first place. Taken together, these books demonstrate that ideology or the party in power matters little - elections become a charade, masking the control of government by capital and its corporate controllers.

5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3 out of 5 stars

Intriguing in Places, Sermonizing in Others, 2006-06-19
Kevin Phillips is not a bad man. He genuinely has an interest in the admittedly complex topic of economics, wealth consolidation and its effects on democratic institutions. The problem with Phillips' book is not that he has shed his Republican affiliation to take up the cause of progressive crusading, but that it often shifts from the gripping to the mind-numbingly technical without warning.

There are valid points in Phillips' book that are deserving of deeper thought and consideration; resorting to charts and trend diagrams, however, is not always the best way to illuminate the ideas Phillips wants to express in his work. At times Phillips seems more content to showcase just how much he knows rather than relating that information to the reader in a way that can then be turned into a point of discussion that does not border on a PowerPoint presentation.

At times Phillips spends more time placing blame for certain economic problems than he does discussing causes and possible solutions, though this can be forgiven if the reader follows Phillips' apocalyptic view of what is to come if the increased consolidation of wealth among the very few continues. In highly-charged political times, readers are apt to either give this work five stars or one, in line with their prevailing political ideology. The truth is, Wealth and Democracy is not a brilliant work, nor is it a worthless waste of time. Nearly every reader can find something interesting to grab hold of in Phillips' work. That is worth something.

Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon website at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.