Diversity Matters: Judicial Policy Making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. By Susan B. Haire and Laura P. Moyer. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. 200p. $45.00.

(p. 29). It has not simply stopped advancing; it has regressed. This seems correct in three respects: Labor unions are weak (the unionization rate has fallen to about the same level as in 1933), the Democratic Party no longer dominates national politics, and income inequality between the top 1% of Americans and everyone else has risen sharply (to pre-1930s levels). And in one respect, the present era may be worse than its pre–New Deal counterpart: Wages for workers in the middle and below have been flat for four decades. At the same time, there have been important, lasting improvements. Americans are more economically secure due to an array of public insurance programs—Social Security, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and more. For instance, in 1935 only 6% of Americans had health insurance, whereas today 91% do, almost all of them via a government program (Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veteran’s Administration) or a government-subsidized employer-provided plan. We have a much higher wage and income floor. The poverty rate, likely greater than 50% prior to the mid-1930s, is now about 15%, and even that understates the gains in living standards for the least well-off. In the mid-1930s, about 45% of Americans were homeowners; today 65% are. Although we are not doing as well as we should on equality of opportunity, we are surely ahead of where we were in 1935. Funding inequality across K–12 public schools and districts is much less unequal; more families who do not have access to a good public school can choose a charter alternative; and 65% of a typical cohort enters college, including 30% of those whose parents’ income is in the bottom fifth. What of the present and future? According to Cowie, the “most urgent of projects” is to reduce economic inequality (p. 32), because it leads to political dominance by elites and because it correlates with “a host of negative outcomes, including shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality, higher incarceration rates, lower levels of trust, higher rates of mental illness, more crime, and truncated social mobility” (p. 221). Here, too, we need to be clear about what the evidence says. While top-end income inequality has returned to pre–New Deal levels, that is not true of inequality more broadly. Gender and racial gaps in schooling, jobs, and incomes have decreased significantly, as Cowie notes. The effective federal tax rate on the top 1% of taxpayers was the same in 2013 as in 1979 (cuts by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were canceled out by hikes under George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama). Wealth inequality almost certainly is a good bit lower than pre-1935. For all of the justifiable concern about inequality of political influence, we lack systematic evidence that corporations and the richest Americans have more control over policy decisions now than they did a generation ago, much less a century ago. And the empirical case that income inequality is bad for health, safety, and other social outcomes is thin at best. Cowie’s arguments imply that enacting public social programs will not secure much in the way of sustained progress for ordinary Americans unless coupled with a significant weakening of corporate power, economic inequality, and individualism. While I am not persuaded, it is a reasonable hypothesis. And The Great Exception is an engaging, thoughtful, provocative contribution.