How today's politically ineffectual billionaire CEOs make the corporate elites of the 1950s look like moderate pragmatists.

Summary: In his 1956 book The Power Elite, sociologist C. Wright Mills painted a disturbing picture of U.S. society in which a small group of people at the heads of corporations, government, and the military exercised increasing control over important decisions affecting the country and its citizenry. In this episode of Ear to the Pavement, we talk to sociologist Mark Mizruchi, author of The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, about how Mills' classic has held up over time, and what light might it shed on the current crisis of inequality in the United States in which three men - Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett - own as much wealth as the bottom half of Americans.