"The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind"
About this Quote
A polite sentence that lands like an indictment. Greider’s line isn’t a vague complaint about “the economy” so much as a specific accusation about governance: the system is run, deliberately, for someone else. The phrasing matters. “Governed” shifts the blame from impersonal market forces to human choices - laws, budgets, regulatory priorities, and the quiet deals that shape wages, housing, healthcare, and debt. It punctures the comforting story that inequality is an unfortunate byproduct of growth, instead framing it as a design feature.
“The bottom half” is doing strategic work, too. Not “the poor,” not “the working class,” but a numeric majority. That choice broadens the moral claim and sharpens the democratic one: if most people are structurally disregarded, then the legitimacy of the system itself is in question. Greider is also sidestepping culture-war labels; he’s talking about material outcomes that show up in rent hikes, job insecurity, and threadbare safety nets.
The subtext is that economic policy often treats ordinary people as variables to be managed - labor flexibility, consumer confidence, “human capital” - while treating asset holders as constituents. It’s a critique of a politics where inflation gets more urgent sympathy than unemployment, where bailouts arrive faster than wage gains, and where prosperity is measured in stock charts that the bottom half doesn’t own.
Written in the long shadow of late-20th-century deregulation and financialization, the line reads as a warning: when governance stops imagining the majority, resentment doesn’t stay economic. It metastasizes into mistrust, nihilism, and a search for scapegoats.
“The bottom half” is doing strategic work, too. Not “the poor,” not “the working class,” but a numeric majority. That choice broadens the moral claim and sharpens the democratic one: if most people are structurally disregarded, then the legitimacy of the system itself is in question. Greider is also sidestepping culture-war labels; he’s talking about material outcomes that show up in rent hikes, job insecurity, and threadbare safety nets.
The subtext is that economic policy often treats ordinary people as variables to be managed - labor flexibility, consumer confidence, “human capital” - while treating asset holders as constituents. It’s a critique of a politics where inflation gets more urgent sympathy than unemployment, where bailouts arrive faster than wage gains, and where prosperity is measured in stock charts that the bottom half doesn’t own.
Written in the long shadow of late-20th-century deregulation and financialization, the line reads as a warning: when governance stops imagining the majority, resentment doesn’t stay economic. It metastasizes into mistrust, nihilism, and a search for scapegoats.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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