Quotes from Jacob S. Hacker

The United States now ranks twentieth out of twenty-seven OECD nations in the share of young people expected to finish high school.50

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the United States would have to spend $3.6 trillion more than currently budgeted just to bring our infrastructure up to acceptable levels by 2020.95 China and India are spending almost 10 percent of GDP on infrastructure; Europe, around 5 percent.96 Even Mexico spends just over 3 percent.97 The United States has not broken 3 percent once since the mid-1970s.98

Want a vivid image of how American bodies have changed? The average American woman now weighs around 165 pounds. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that's essentially what the average American man weighed in 1960. (Today's average man is around 195 pounds.)111 Americans were once the tallest people in the advanced industrial world. We are now not just among the shortest but also far and away the heaviest.

Once without peer, the United States has fallen to nineteenth in college completion in the OECD, and the gap in completion between higher-income and lower-income students has widened.56 Older Americans are the most educated in the world. Younger Americans, not even close.

Public R&D expenditures are already at their lowest level as a share of the economy in forty years, and they are slated to fall to their lowest level—0.5 percent of GDP in 2021—since before the great mobilization of science during World War II.85 If they were instead increased in line with the size of the economy, according to one cautious calculation, the economy would generate more than a half trillion dollars in additional income over the next nine years.86

A mostly anonymous figure until his death in 2018, Hofeller liked to describe gerrymandering as "the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States." He once told an audience of state legislators, "Redistricting is like an election in reverse. It's a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters.

Voters are scattered all over the ideological map, but there are strikingly few that thrill to the plutocratic combination of economic conservatism and social liberalism.

As the concentration of wealth and power at the top increased, the Democratic Party faced cross-pressures that muddied its message and moderated its stances on economic matters. The Republic Party, in stark contrast, radicalized. Starting as a standard-issue center-right party, it mutated into an ultraconservative insurgent force, one that cast its lot with plutocracy even as plutocracy's rise endangered the economic security and opportunity of many of its voters.

The rise of inequality and fall of unions are closely linked.