How the rich got richer

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson tell a story that is at once familiar and unfamiliar. The familiar part is that over the past 30 years inequality in both wealth and income has grown dramatically in the United States.

Since the late 1970s the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation's population has pocketed more than 35 percent of the real national income growth, which is more than the bottom 90 percent of the population combined. Or looking at it from a different angle, between 1979 and 2006 the bottom 20 percent of the population had real income growth of 0.3 percent and the middle 20 percent had real income growth of 0.7 percent, while the top 1 percent enjoyed real income growth of an astonishing 260 percent.

We have moved from what Hacker and Pierson call the "Broadland" of the 30 years before 1979, when growth in wealth was broadly shared by all sectors of the population, to "Richistan," where the lion's share of wealth goes to the top 1 percent. And the tiny growth in the real income of the middle class has been the consequence of people working more: individuals are working more hours, and more family members are in the job market.