An analysis of how the wealthiest 9.9 percent of Americans—those just below the tip of the wealth pyramid—have exacerbated the growing inequality in our country and distorted our social values.
Brilliant ... Compelling ... Stewart is both cartographer and critic, serving as a kind of appalled anthropologist as he reveals the self-justifying delusions and harmful customs that define the demographic ... Each chapter in the book examines the behavior and beliefs of the 9.9 percent in a specific domain — fitness, merit, housing, parenting, gender, education, real estate, race, etc. Many of these chapters are extraordinary investigations in their own right, dense with empirical detail and insightful analysis, and they collectively establish beyond any reasonable doubt the book’s fundamental claim ... The political and moral arguments for decreasing inequality through public spending on public goods are as old as America ... Stewart’s book is a worthy contribution to this long tradition, and his arguments deserve the widest possible audience ... What gives the book its relentlessly sharp edge is his exposure of so much conventional wisdom as ultimately self-serving and deluded.
A far-reaching indictment of a conceptually indefensible but institutionally rigid status quo, and it’s to Stewart’s credit that he resists portraying the 9.9 percent as some sort of fallen patrician elite ... Stewart writes trenchantly about the inner workings of this system because he knows it firsthand: He’s the former founding partner of a global management consulting firm ... Stewart counsels a reclamation of the ideals of liberal democracy within the context of our productive lives ... It’s admittedly an exceptionally tall order in today’s reason-averse and authoritarian-trending plutocracy, but as Stewart makes clear throughout this clear-eyed and incisive study, the template we’ve inherited for discussions of the social democratic harms wrought by the regime of American inequality are exhausted to the point of futility ... If nothing else, The 9.9 Percent is a bracing glimpse of life on the other side of the blindfolds—together with a provisional blueprint for reform once our powers of sight are fully restored.
Unfortunately, Stewart’s portrait of the 9.9 percent draws on few firsthand interviews with members of this class. He relies instead on examples culled from sources like Slate and on made-up characters such as 'Ultramom,' a cartoonish figure ... Such caricaturing may resonate with the popular anger at elites. But it fails to lend much insight into what Stewart calls 'the mind of the 9.9 percent,' or for that matter, to demonstrate that such a uniform thing exists ... In contemporary America, the lives of the wealthy bear increasingly little resemblance to those of working-class people, much less to those who are poor. Stewart is surely right to view this as a problem and to question why it has generated so much less outrage and concern than the obscene fortunes of the superrich. But the growing chasm between the 9.9 percent and the rest of society only underscores why pushing beyond reductive stereotypes to explain how affluent professionals think about, and justify, their wealth and privilege is important. Doing so can help illuminate both how deep the economic disparities in America have become and how inequality is validated and sustained.
