Why the poor don't soak the rich

Daedalus

Volumn 131, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 118-127

  Shapiro, Ian ^a  

^a American Academy   (United States)

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EID: 45949091625     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. An expanded version of this essay, including extensive discussion of the literature on which it is based, can be found at .
2. Inequality in the United States remained comparatively stable throughout the nineteenth century and only began to drop in the 193OS; yet during this period a number of voting reforms expanding the franchise were enacted. See Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 62-63;
3. and Michael Levin, The Spectre of Democracy (Hampshire, U.K.: Macmillan, 1992), 3-9.
4. For data on the explosive growth of incarceration in the United States (which has transformed the United States from a country that incarcerated around one hundred per one hundred thousand between World War II and 1970 to one that incarcerated over four hundred per one hundred thousand by the mid-199OS), see John Irwin and James Austin, It's About Time: America's Imprisonment Binge (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Pub. Co. 1997), 1-3.
5. Almost three-quarters of those incarcerated have not committed violent offenses of any kind; convictions for drug possession or trafficking account for the great majority of the increase. Ibid., 19-61.
6. Douglas Rae, "Democratic Liberty and Tyrannies of Place," in Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón, eds., Democracy's Edges (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 165-192.
7. See also Thomas J. Sugrue, "The Structures of Urban Poverty: The Reorganization of Space and Work in Three Periods of American History," in Michael Katz, ed., The Underclass Debate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
8. Friedrich Breyer and Heinrich W. Ursprung, "Arc the Rich Too Rich to be Expropriated?: Economic Power and Feasibility of Constitutional Limits to Redistribution," Public Choice 94 (1/2) (1998): 135-156.
9. James M. Snyder and Gerald H. Kramer, "Fairness, Self-interest, and the Politics of the Progressive Income Tax," Journal of Public Economics 36 (1988): 197-230.
10. Jonathan Kozol quotes a teacher in the South Bronx: "Many of the ambitions of children⋯ are locked in at a level that suburban kids would scorn. It's as if the very possibilities of life have been scaled back. Boys who are doing well in school will tell me, 'I would like to be a sanitation man.' I have to guard my words and not say anything to indicate my sense of disappointment. In this neighborhood, a sanitation job is something to be longed for." Kozol, Amazing Grace (New York: Crown, 1995), 125.