New York Times Suggests US is Turning into a Banana Republic

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The top 1% of our countries socioeconomic stata now have more than the bottom 24% combined. Nicholas D. Kristof writes and op-ed piece for the New York Times called "Our Banana Republic" which examines some of the implications of this growing inequality:

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

While I think he leaves out some of the more sociological aspects of this (for example, questions about the cultural production implications of such imbalance, as well as the extent to which this undermines much of the social infrastructure, making our society weaker in the long run), he gives one a lot to think about.