Paul Krugman recollects a point he made years ago that Chuck Spinney and Joseph Stiglitz and Martin Auerbach have been pressing home for over a decade. Absentee landlords and capital flight from the heartland. TWO sucking chest wounds.
Paul Krugman
New York Times, 1 November 2011
Dean Baker raises an important point here: it’s really awfully late in the game to be saying that the important inequality issue is college graduates versus non-graduates. It’s not clear that this was ever true, and it certainly hasn’t been true for a while.
I wrote about this years ago, using Ben Bernanke’s maiden testimony as Fed chair as an entry point. As I said then, Bernanke — like many others — had made:
a fundamental misreading of what’s happening to American society. What we’re seeing isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.
