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"The poor have not started working."

There’s an implicit notion here that we’re waiting for the poor to start working. Perhaps it's coincidental, but I’d like to call out a possible conflation, because it's something I've seen expressed from time to time on Hacker News, and I think it perpetuates erroneous beliefs about poverty.

Krugman here is talking about the very poor; this is a relative statement, and it is almost a tautology to say that most of them don't work. (Rather, one should be quite scandalized that anyone who works could still be very poor.) Whatever the merit or relevance of his point may be, he’s not trying to characterize the conditions of poverty. He's trying to express the scale of the wealth disparity between rich and poor, and point out that a simple model of rent-seeking cannot account for it.

‘Poverty’ itself is a somewhat relative term, but only somewhat. People recognize hardship when they experience it, and a plateau in the relation between happiness and wealth has been identified. At some point down the sloping portion of that relation, we have to recognize poverty.

I do not think that any scholar has disputed that there are a significant number of Americans who work as much as they can, willingly, and yet live in poverty. One can argue whether most of the impoverished have work, but one cannot dismiss those that do. It is inhumane and does not honour their effort.

Maybe they are stupid people, with bad lives, who make bad decisions. Let’s allow every secret prejudice we have, just so long as we do not ignore that they work and go wanting for things we regard as essential. It is not by choice nor lack of action that they experience hardship. There is no more justice to their income than there is justice in the grades of a bell curve. They cannot work any harder or smarter than they are working already.

Your thesis is fundamentally wrong.

>citing the growth in inequality since the 1990s only makes [Krugman's (1990)] point about dollar gains/losses more stark.

Actually, nothing is different nowadays as from long ago in history: the class-warfare is still the rich (capital) waging class-warfare on the poor (labor). Krugman, whom you quote, realizes this as well and rescinded his comments from that time:

"I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn’t seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism — which shouldn’t be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications. But I think we’d better start paying attention to those implications."[1]

"The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense."[2]

[1] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robo...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-and...

Neither of the posts you cite contradict Krugman's original argument. They merely argue that the rich have a new way of becoming richer without exploiting or the poor (namely robots).

The mood affiliation is different, certainly. But I'm citing arguments, not tone.

I can't read your link. It's my impression that two-worker households are much more common now among the poor, in which case the poor are working more on the whole, and they're certainly being paid a smaller share of the value of their labour (see the worker productivity vs. income graph).

There is no relationship between "worker productivity" (real GDP/worker or real GDP/hour of labor) and the value of labor. When capital substitutes for labor, it reduces the denominator in the GDP/worker equation, thereby increasing productivity without increasing the value of labor.

Further, most graphs of the sort you mention compare mean productivity (you can't measure any other kind in aggregate) to median income, which is a statistical fallacy.

If you have data suggesting the poor work more than in the past, please present it.

> Historically this has been true, but nowadays it's not (at least in the US).

Not true in 1990. Very true today. The Bush tax cuts inaugurated the current era of class warfare. I'd say 2010 is when it really got going.

Krugman failed to notice that back then the exploitation was happening: it was the middle class being transformed into the working poor.