Journalist Daniel Brook's book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, is in part on the new inequality and how it "is a problem for just about everyone." I haven't had a chance to read the book, but my understanding is that the book focuses on young, well-educated, idealistic, progressives and their professional career choices. Here is the author's own take on the phenomenon and book. And here is a review from The American Prospect.
Based on the reviews, it seems that one of the book's arguments is the decline in the share of jobs offering middle-class salaries. While this argument is hardly novel, few people seems to be familiar with data supporting this claim. One bit of data is available from NALP, the Association for Legal Career Professionals. Particularly striking to me is this chart of full-time salaries among folks in the law school class of 2006:
Source:Jobs & JD's, Class of 2006.
Note: The graph is based on 22,665 salaries. A few salaries above $200,000 are excluded for clarity. The first peak in this graph reflects salaries of both $40,000 and $50,000 (each about 11% of reported salaries). The second peak reflects salaries of $135,000 (10% of reported salaries) and $145,000 (7% of reported salaries).
Brook's piece makes a case for why we should care about a chart like this:
"So when we talk about the polarization of the class structure we aren’t talking, as conservatives would have you believe, about college educated people pulling away from high school drop-outs or talented, hard workers being rewarded while dopey slackers fall behind. We’re talking about the corporate class—who often have the same educational credentials as many public servants and creative types—pulling away from everyone else."
More broadly, economists David Autor, Larry Katz, and Melissa Kearney have documented a hollowing out of the middle of the labor marketover the past couple of decades, with inequality growth particularly sharp between the middle and the very top.
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