Voices
two cities” the metropolis lived
through during the political reign
of its incumbent billionaire boss.
This recognition that surging
income inequality is an urgent
political problem marks an important shift. That’s because the
widening gap isn’t a new story.
Income inequality in much of the
world has been rising for three
decades. But until the 2008 financial crisis, and the global
recession which it triggered,
there were some plausible ways
to deny — or at least to hope
— that the rise of the 1 percent
wasn’t a problem.
The strongest argument was
that even though those at the
very top were pulling away from
everyone else, people in the
middle and even at the bottom
weren’t doing too badly either.
Globalization and the technology revolution, the story went,
hadn’t only created the vast fortunes of the 0.1 percent, they
had improved the lives of the
99 percent with more and less
expensive goods and services.
That thesis was partly a chimera, magicked into being by the
consumer credit bubble which
created the temporary illusion
of middle class prosperity. But
CHRYSTIA
FREELAND
HUFFINGTON
02.02.14
this explanation was also powerful because it was partly true
— familiar goods from cars to
t-shirts are cheaper and longerlasting than ever before, and all
our lives have been transformed
You see it in the U.S. in
the election of Bill de Blasio
as mayor of New York... in
California Governor Jerry
Brown’s successful tax increase
on the rich; in the emergence
of Elizabeth Warren as one of
her party’s leaders.”
by the internet and mobile communication.
Once the credit bubble burst,
though, our wonderful new
devices and consumer goods
weren’t enough to mask the
other reality of the big economic
transformation of our time — the
hollowing out of middle class
incomes and jobs. It is this fact
— that, in a time of abundance,
middle class incomes are stagnating and employment is anemic
— that has transformed rising
income inequality from an academic issue into a political one.