ABSTRACT
Referring to current concerns that a neo-Marxist analysis might illuminate, I made the point in the last chapter that we are in the midst of an economic era that had its beginnings in the ‘Reagan Revolution’ of the early 1980s. Since that time the U.S. has developed record-breaking inequality, a financialized economy that crashed and burned and left millions of people unemployed and some homeless (as their mortgage payments rose out of reach and their homes were repossessed), and federal education policy that purports to deal with the economic crises of inequality and poverty but cannot. This chapter explores a different aspect of inequality than Chapter Three, which discussed economic (jobs and income) inequalities and attempts by the government to reduce these through education policy. The present chapter views inequality through the 82lens of recent fundamental changes in the economy. These changes have to do with the financialization of our system of profit making. The U.S. economy used to create profit for business owners and shareholders almost solely by providing products and services to the U.S. (and other) consumers. Now, however, the economy functions less and less to produce products and services for consumption, and more and more to create profits for a small elite of wealthy bankers and other investors through complex financial speculation. A major consequence of economic financialization is the astounding increases in inequality in our country that I have been referencing throughout this book (see Lipman, in press, for global consequences of financialization).
