The 9.9 Percent

May 1, 2021

Today, those claiming the top .1 percent of wealth in America are flying high, while the bottom 90 percent are doing worse than ever. What about the 9.9 percent? Says Stewart, an independent scholar who acknowledges that as a former management consultant he once belonged to their ranks, these money mongers control more than half of the wealth in the country--and their desire to hang on to their wealth and their status works to the detriment of the poorly paid underclass on whom they rely. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from September 1, 2021
"The spectacular rise of the 0.1 percent has received plenty of ink over the past decade," the author writes, "but the expanding chasm between the [lower] 90 percent and the [upper] 9.9 percent in some ways matters more to the real story of inequality in American life." And in this withering assessment of the overweighted, nearly intractable socioeconomic power of that 9.9 percent--all conveyed with an acid humor that recalls the late social critics Henry Fairlie and Paul Fussell--Stewart lays out why. From longstanding racial injustice to the rise of unreason in our politics to the myth of meritocracy to the disparities in health between rich and poor, Stewart folds in the latest in economics and social-science research to show precisely the terrible consequences of that inequality on the country at large. "The problem is not that the paid-up members of the 9.9 percent are an exceptionally self-interested or immoral group," he concludes. "The problem is their failure to grasp that it is very difficult to act justly in an unjust society." Holding out a sliver of hope for positive change, Stewart's study has the power to transform minds not yet closed to the possibility.

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Starred review from August 1, 2021
A charged study of the second-tier wealthy in America, the principal engine of inequality. Yes, the richest of the rich own a disproportionate share of the world's wealth, the top one-thousandth who "now own almost one quarter of everything of economic value in the country." This represents an index of inequality that, writes philosopher and historian Stewart, we haven't seen since before the Great Depression. Overlooked, though, are the remaining 9.9 percent in that top-10 tier, those whose net worth, beginning in the low millions, collectively embraces "more than half of [the] personal wealth in the nation." These people, overwhelmingly White and well educated, are enthusiastic proponents of the myths of merit and the wisdom of the free market ("the great opiate of the 9.9 percent"), which is not free and also generates inequality as a feature and not a bug. Indeed, the capture and hoarding of so many financial resources by this cohort yields inequality on every front: enclaved neighborhoods that constitute de facto segregated housing, elite schools that constitute de facto segregated education, and an academia that is all too willing to support these inequalities and the accompanying politics of unreason. "Intellectuals like Amy Chua and Jonathan Haidt occupy the most meritorious perches in the American hierarchy of learning," writes Stewart. "Why do they have so much trouble calling a con job a con job? If they are not standing up for reason, then who is?" Those are questions demanding answers, and underlying them is that politics of unreason, which "always favors injustice over justice and...always targets those who are most vulnerable." Stewart's charges are comprehensive, and sometimes he can be a little testy ("Universal American stupidity was undoubtedly a comorbidity factor for Covid-19"), but he matches them with a reasonable demand for a commitment to economic justice that would elevate all Americans, not just the lucky few. A sharp-tongued, altogether readable, and welcome assault on unrestrained wealth.

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