American Society: How It Really Works

American Society Recent Sociology Titles from W. W. Norton Code of the Street by Elijah Anderson The Cosmopolitan Canopy by Elijah Anderson Social Problems, Second Edition, by Joel Best The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change by Philip N. Cohen You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking like a Sociologist, Fourth Edition, by Dalton Conley The Real World: An Introduction to Sociology, Fourth Edition, by Kerry Ferris and Jill Stein Essentials of Sociology, Fifth Edition, by Anthony Giddens, Mitchell Duneier, Richard P. Appelbaum, and Deborah Carr Introduction to Sociology, Ninth Edition, by Anthony Giddens, Mitchell Duneier, Richard P. 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Risman and Virginia Rutter The Sociology of News, Second Edition, by Michael Schudson The Social Construction of Sexuality, Third Edition, by Steven Seidman Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader, Fourth Edition, edited by Mindy Stombler, Dawn M. Baunach, Wendy O. Simonds, Elroi J. Windsor, and Elisabeth O. Burgess Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions by Lisa Wade and Myra Marx Ferree More than Just Race by William Julius Wilson Cultural Sociology: An Introductory Reader edited by Matt Wray To learn more about Norton Sociology, please visit wwnorton.com/soc American Society HOW IT REALLY WORKS SECOND EDITION ERIK OLIN WRIGHT UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON JOEL ROGERS UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON W. W. Norton & Company B NEW YORK • LONDON W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By midcentury, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college, and professional titles published each year—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees. Copyright © 2015, 2011 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Editor: Sasha Levitt Associate Editor: Nicole Sawa Project Editor: Rachel Mayer Editorial Assistants: Thea Goodrich and Mary Williams Manuscript Editor: Chris Thillen Managing Editor, College: Marian Johnson Managing Editor, College Digital Media: Kim Yi Production Manager: Ashley Horna Media Editor: Eileen Connell Marketing Manager, Sociology: Julia Hall Design Director: Rubina Yeh Permissions Manager: Megan Jackson Composition: Jouve North America Manufacturing: Sheridan Books, Inc. Permission to use copyrighted material is included on p. 555. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wright, Erik Olin. American society : how it really works / Erik Olin Wright, Joel Rogers. — Second edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-393-93885-2 (pbk.) 1. Social values—United States. 2. United States—Social conditions. 3. United States— Economic conditions. 4. United States—Moral conditions. 5. United States—Civilization. I. Rogers, Joel, 1952- II. Title. HN90.M6W75 2015 306.0973—dc23 2014047605 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110-0017 wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ABOUT THE AUTHORS Erik Olin Wright is Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of many books, including Classes, Inter- rogating Inequality, Class Counts, Deepening Democracy (with Archon Fung), Envisioning Real Utopias, and Understanding Class. In 2011–2012 he was president of the American Sociological Association. Joel Rogers is Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Director of COWS. His many books include On Democracy, Right Turn, The Forgotten Majority, and What Workers Want. A longtime activist, Rogers was identified by Newsweek as one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape U.S. politics and culture in the twenty- first century. For Marcia and Sarah CON TEN TS Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii 1: Prologue: Perspectives and Values 1 2: What Kind of Society Is American Society? 10 PART I CAPITALISM 3: The Capitalist Market: How It Is Supposed to Work 37 4: The Capitalist Market: How It Actually Works 49 5: The Environment 71 6: Transportation 102 7: Consumerism 120 8: Health Care 142 9: Finance 179 10: Building a High- Road Economy 216 PART II INEQUALITY 11: Thinking about Fairness and Inequality 245 12: Class 257 13: Persistent Poverty and Rising Inequality 267 14: Ending Poverty in America 297 15: Racial Inequality 312 16: Gender Inequality 364 vii viii Contents PART III DEMOCRACY 17: Democracy: How It Works 405 18: Elections and Voting 421 19: Taxation and the Attack on the Affirmative State 446 20: Corporate Control of the Media 469 21: Militarism and Empire 485 22: Labor Unions 505 23: Democracy from Below 521 CONCLUSION 24: Possible Futures 543 Credits 555 Index 557 PREFACE This book is the product of a long friendship, the shared values and con- cerns that animate it, and a small convention we agreed to more than twenty- five years ago to keep that friendship well nourished. The small convention was that we would have a cup of coffee and take a walk together every Sunday morning that we were both in town. The point was simply to give us some regular time to connect with each other— on sociology de- partment business, current events, research interests, family news, or what- ever else was on our minds. We have observed this convention with a constancy that even Kant might have admired. On most of the Sunday mornings since, rain, snow, or shine, you could have found us— fortified by coffee, usually accompanied by one of Wright’s succession of dogs, sometimes by a visiting colleague— strolling around Madison’s many lakes and woods, intent in conversation. During Madison’s long winters when the lakes freeze over, you could have found us strolling on them. This amuses visitors from warmer climes, and is tolerated by the ice fisherman we always find there first, camped in their solitary pursuit of quiet and cold fish. Early in the history of these walks, Rogers proposed that Wright con- sider joining him in teaching a large undergraduate lecture course on con- temporary American society that he had developed shortly after arriving in Madison in 1987. Wright, in Madison since 1976, had never taught such a course— not because of special aversion to undergraduates, but simply because he was fully occupied with research and graduate students. But Rog- ers claimed he would enjoy the experience and learn from it. In the early 1990s, Wright finally gave it a try, and immediately realized that Rogers had been right. Teaching hundreds of undergraduates as a group was indeed fun, and the challenge of making complex and often controversial ideas ac- cessible to them did sharpen his own thinking, reminding him that teaching is the best way to learn. ix x Preface Since that time we have both taught this course, always jointly develop- ing the course’s content and a shared set of lecture notes that we revised together over time. We never used a textbook, but rather a collection of readings, revised each time the course was offered, that at least loosely cov- ered the topics of the lectures. The latter contained the real guts of the course. This way of handling the lectures and readings worked well enough but had two problems. Students often got a bit overwhelmed by processing both the lecture material and the loosely related readings. And the readings, because only loosely related, provided no real means of catch- up for students who might miss a key lecture, especially on a particularly complicated part of the argument in the course. Wright then suggested a natural solu- tion to this problem, which was to turn our lectures into a book. We or others could, of course, always supplement this book with additional mate- rials, but the book would ensure that the core of the course would always be available to students outside of lectures. We had no disagreements on course content, and we had gone over our detailed lecture notes time and again, so Wright thought this would be an easy task, taking only a few months of steady work. He was wrong. All the things that make a good book different from a good lecture meant that converting our notes to narrative took longer than expected. But we eventually got it done. Because Wright wound up doing the greater share of this conversion work, we put his name first on the book, but we regard it as fully a joint product from the two of us.

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