Featured on booktv . Send us any mail to booktv cspan. Org. Tweet as booktv. Or post on eyewall facebook. Com booktv. I spend almost 50 years trying to understand inequality within standard economic models and the answer was you couldnt. You couldnt. You couldnt understand why it was in the standard competitive equilibrium model, why people of the same skill got such different day. Those models cant explain power relationships how we could not only have discrimination but slavery. That was the most obvious example of a power relationship but then as i got more and more into what i realized those were the easy things to do see. Beneath the surface were lots of more subtle things that were shaping our economy. They were not just affecting blacks and hispanics all of us in one way or another result from the obvious symptoms, how easy it is for people to get together and bargain, collective action, that is easy but there are more subtle things. If you have more monopoly power that is the power to raise prices. Wages adjusted for inflation just as much by lowering, weakening unions workers as you do by strengthening corporations. Those are two sides of the same coin. Than you look at how does the system Work Together . They start seeing where politics starts to enter. Politics affects rules and regulations, it affects tax and expenditure policies and even affects technocratic issues like fairly reserved, like economists, dont let politics interfere with that. But the fact is the Federal Reserve is managed by a group of people appointed, the question is appointed by whom . In whose interests do they serve . There is something called the open market committee, Interest Rates go up or down most of those people are president s of regional Federal Reserve, are not elected in open or transparent, not even confirmed by congress, basically representatives of the Financial Community and the business community. You get policies like a focus on inflation but not on unemployment. The delete the law passed by congress in a more democratic way says inflation, unemployment, baroque, and now even Financial Stability but you have people like Alan Greenspan before the crisis saying we shouldnt be regulating banks, they know much more what to do they believe in self regulation opening up the door for predatory lending, abuse of credit card practices, market manipulation, all these things, the short of it they transfer money from ordinary americans to the people at the very top. That is the way we create inequality, drift by drift. Lot by lot. And it just accumulates. So what we saw is some of these banking practices, predatory lending, particularly insidious because you can see at the same time making poor people for and the rich people richer. That is creating inequality. Thats historic fiction. Im also a history buff, and so