The Middle Class Is Being Wiped Out Of Existence In America
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
But yes, our economy has some serious problems, and inequality is one of them. Not because I believe in socialism, but because above a certain level we waste a lot of money on guarding the current distribution of wealth, and that has a considerable opportunity cost. See this small but rather influential economics article: http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/teac...
My personal hunch is that free economies are never destined for pure equality, but if they drift too far from a Pareto distribution the fiscal disparities will result in sharply increased political polarization. statisticians of the future are going to have a whale of a time with the combination of the census, an unusually severe recession, election data and a massive lexical analysis dataset.
Seems like the majority of people are more suited for holding a job rather than building a company, by optimizing for entrepreneurship we're benefiting a very small part of society, and as we lose the promise of belonging to a strong, stable middle class with certain amount of effort we're creating a serious risk for democracy. I think we're already seeing political fringe movements creeping into the mainstream as result.
Without disposable time and income people won't be able to buy the products which create the wealth of the upper class. If the middle class disappears, the upper class will disappear as well.