ABSTRACT
This recognition forces us to study closely the sources of power conferred onto those who are in charge of policymaking. Some of the leading scholars in the study of inequality and poverty have come to the conclusion that the entrenched elite that today dictates its austerity policies on the rest of the population benefits from a strong support of an oligarchy that uses its wealth to gain control of the political process and, therefore, of the making of economic policy (e.g. Galbraith, 2012, 2016; Stiglitz, 2013, 2016; Hudson, 2015). Social stratification, i.e. the division of societies into poor and wealthy – though not peculiar to capitalism – has recently become polarized, and the oligarchy has succeeded in turning government into a “predator state” (see Galbraith, 2008) and economic policy into an instrument of “class warfare”; according to the ILO (2014) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2012, 2015), the implementation of austerity policies since the 1980s has made long-term unemployment and part-time work the new stylized facts, which resulted in a fall of the share of labour in national income in most OECD countries.
