The pharmaceutical industry, for example, has used its lobbying heft — it spent $272,000 in campaign donations per member of Congress last year, and it has more lobbyists than there are members of Congress — to bar the government from bargaining for drug prices in Medicare. That amounts to a $50 billion annual gift to pharmaceutical companies.

The rise of inequality has complex roots, and some aren’t easily solved. For example, the empowerment of women, coupled with the tendency of people to marry those like themselves, means that high-earning men increasingly pair with high-earning women to form super-high-earning families.

Likewise, many Americans are wealthy in part because they worked hard, saved constantly and invested brilliantly. That’s to be celebrated, but all this plays out on a tilted field that also affects outcomes, and social values.

Paul Piff, a social psychologist, has conducted experiments in which Monopoly games are rigged so that one player has more money to start with and is almost predestined to win. It turns out that the wealthy player lords it over others and even grabs more pretzels from the communal bowl.

In this election season, many Americans feel that they are living that rigged Monopoly game.

Two business school professors, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, showed people charts of the distribution of wealth in egalitarian Sweden and in highly unequal America and asked them which kind of society they would prefer to live in, without saying which country each chart represented. Some 92 percent of Americans chose Sweden’s distribution.

Likewise, the great philosopher John Rawls developed a thought experiment to judge the fairness of a society: Imagine that you will be placed in a society but don’t know your station there. You’re unsure if you’ll be rich or poor, smart or dumb, black or white, male or female. In that case, many of us might choose Sweden as well, rather than risk ending up in the wrong ZIP code in the United States today.