Tightrope

In Tightrope, the authors describe the consequences of policies that have exacerbated income inequality and undermined working-class communities in the United States, policies that have been put in place since the 1970s. In addition, two crises of the past several decades—the opioid epidemic and the 2008/9 financial crisis—have negatively impacted the working class, while leaving the elites responsible for these crises largely unpunished.

Prior to the 1970s, many countries agreed that unregulated markets would lead to financial and social ruin; this “liberal consensus” led, in the United States, to such policies as the GI Bill of Rights, which helped returning WWII veterans gain access to the housing market with low-cost mortgages and covered tuition and living expenses to increase the country’s stock of human capital. In the 1970s, this consensus began to shift, and governments, including in the United States, began to favor deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the shrinking of government. This trend was particularly pronounced under President Ronald Reagan, who was elected in 1980. This shift in thinking on the role of government was accompanied by attacks on the power of unions, which were further undermined by globalization and the decline of manufacturing in the United States. All of these changes led to a decline in well-paying, blue-collar jobs, even as government programs that once helped people achieve economic stability (such as low-cost mortgages and subsidized university tuition) disappeared. As a result, social mobility has decreased in the United States, and the fear the authors cite in the book—that many working-class people think their children’s lives will be worse than their own—is often borne out. This historical context helps explain how inequality in the United States has risen over the past half-century, to the highest rate of any of the OECD nations.

Other factors have increased inequality, too, such as the 2008/9 financial crisis. The financial crisis was created by reckless and predatory practices by people in the financial industry, after which incomes fell. Those in the top 10% of incomes recovered faster and acquired more wealth after 2008, while the other 90% had less. Despite the damage done by the financial crisis, which was the largest such event since the Great Depression, only one of those responsible went to prison.

Meanwhile, since the 1990s, working-class communities have been dealing with another crisis: the opioid epidemic. Starting in the 1990s, a huge increase in the number of opioids being prescribed—after a push by Purdue Pharma, in particular, which marketed its painkiller OxyContin as a safe, nonaddictive treatment for chronic pain—rates of addiction to and overdose deaths from prescription pills increased significantly. This increase was followed by an increase in overdose deaths from heroin, as the scale of the crisis became known and people cut off from their supply of prescription pills turned to heroin, and finally a wave of deaths from the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Though this crisis has killed more than 500,000 people and ruined the lives of millions more, particularly in working-class communities, Purdue Pharma and other companies have not been given criminal sanctions, and instead have been fined in amounts that pale in comparison to profits made from opioids. Therefore, response to these crises is symptomatic of inequality, too.