The 21st-century left has often argued that the solution to rampant inequality is income redistribution. But this may not be a silver bullet. What workers need is power over employers and the market.

A paper published a few years ago in the American Economic Journal has raised eyebrows within and outside of the profession. Combining national accounts data with household surveys, its authors found that the United States redistributed a greater share of its gross domestic product through taxes and transfers to its poor than any of its wealthy, mostly Western European, peers.

As it turns out, the “inequality gap” between the United States and Europe is not explicable by the comparative generosity of the latter’s welfare states, which are in fact funded by more regressive systems of indirect

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