Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson are among the leading figures in contemporary American political economics. Their book Why Nations Fail (2012) was shortlisted for the 2012 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year and included in the Washington Post's ‘ten best books’ for the same year. Their previous book, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2005), was similarly well received, being awarded the 2007 American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Award. Allan Drazen called their book ‘truly pathbreaking’ (2007, 163) and William Easterly described it as ‘one of the most important contributions to the literature on the economies of democracy in a very long time’ (2007, 173). With this acclaim, it is fair to say that Acemoglu and Robinson represent a predominant and prizewinning branch of political economic analysis conducted in the United States, a kind of political economy especially concerned with macroeconomic growth.

One of their core beliefs is that the US has a high degree of democratization because of its inclusive economic institutions (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012a, 74). In my view this assessment is hard to sustain when considering the differences between the 99 per cent and the 1 per cent. The threshold for household membership to the 1 per cent is a net worth of nearly $4 million. Together this group owns roughly 36 per cent of all private wealth. For financial wealth, their share is over 40 per cent. For stock, the share increases to 50 per cent; for business equity, over 60 per cent. But even within this cluster, there are significant differences between the 0.01 per cent and the remainder of the 1 per cent. The wealth threshold to be categorized as a member of the 0.01 per cent is $111 million. The 6,000-odd families that belong to this group average a net worth of $371 million (Saez and Zucman, 2014; Wolff, 2017). It is worth noting is that Trump's cabinet had more wealth than the bottom third of Americans combined. Together Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett have more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the American population, nearly 165 million people (Collins and Hoxie, 2017, 2).