Professor Kathleen Reardon of USC's Marshall School has an op-ed at Huffington Post warning us of where the US is going:
Income inequality is about to get worse, according to David Segal's
article in Sunday's New York Times. Those of us not in the beneficiary column, the article suggests, had better start thinking of which "artisanal services" we can provide. In short, we need to identify what the rich need and start making those widgets tout de suite.
Paraphrasing Professor Caplin of NYU, Segal wrote:
"While it's noble to focus on how to spread wealth around, it might be wiser to think of ways the poor and middle class could cater to the economy's biggest winners."
The Republican Party has staked out a position where anything to the left of extreme selfishness is on the slippery slope to socialism. But it hasn't occurred to Democrats to counter with the more real scenario of creeping aristocracy.
And what do we hear from the White House? Talk about compromise, common ground and caution.
Republicans, and the very rich they serve, aren't interested in compromise, and they have virtually no common ground with the rest of us!
Some more quotes from Professor Caplan:
“Unfortunately, there will be income inequality,” he says, “but enough people will make money that those who don’t would do well, in as much as they understand the needs of that group.”
He says he expects a rise in what he call “artisanal services,” like cooks, nutritionists, small-scale farmers. He sees services emerging that aid the wealthy at the intersection of health and genetic science. He imagines a rise in technology services, too — experts who keep clients current about technology which can advance their interests in business, in the media, on search engines and so on.
Professor Caplin worries that this concept might be caricatured as “cater to the rich.” But he suggested that this country could use a lot more non-judgmental thinking about the future of the United States economy. Any argument on that subject that starts with the word “should,” he said, is not nearly as useful as one that starts with “could” and has a firm grasp on “is.”
What Prof. Kaplan is stating is the concept of a "
Plutonomy." A plutonomy is not just an economy where income is concentrated at the top, the upper 1% or so, it's an economy dominated by serving the needs of the upper 1%. The rest of us won't matter.
This is the future ahead for us, unless we can push Democrats to start showing some spine and stand up to Republican greed.
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