The protesters who swirled into parks, churches, and town squares around the world in the fall of 2011 to challenge the primacy of the “1%” hammered relentlessly on one theme above all others: that economic inequality has deep roots in the political system. Many social scientists and intellectuals who have picked up from where the Occupy movement left off share this conviction; they, too, have broken with the taboos that for so long segmented discussions of politics from economics. Piketty, in his monumental study, for example, avows that income distribution is a basically a question of “political economy” not pure economics. Stiglitz in The Price of Inequality is equally forthright – “increasingly, and especially in the United States, it seems that the political system is more akin to ‘one dollar one vote’ than to ‘one person one vote.’”
