Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I assess the state of opportunity in America and ways to expand it. This article is more than 10 years old. Part 1 in the series, ...

Increasing income inequality has decreased the share of the population earning a middle-class income. A commonly used method to assess the strength of the middle class is to look at the nation’s ...

Jonathan Rauch has an interesting piece in National Journal on inequality. He argues that a longstanding consensus among economists may be dissolving -- the idea that inequality is not really a ...

The U.S. seems to finally have decided that inequality is a problem. The reassurance that a rising tide would lift all boats rings hollow after a series of recessions left so many stuck in the mud.

I care about economic inequality. I teach a class on it. I wrote a book about it. Yet, recently, two different arguments have popped up with a seemingly similar conclusion: economic inequality hasn’t ...

The United States has always had something like a middle class, but for most of our history it has been a distinction not necessarily dependent on income or wealth. In that sense, we have been unusual ...

According to Goyal, this face-to-face interaction between the working class and the consuming class — repeated transaction ...

The video of Mitt Romney deriding the 47 percent of Americans “who are dependent upon government” has re-ignited a debate about social class in America, roughly one year after the Occupy Wall Street ...

Everyone is worried about the American middle class. The decline of the American worker, and thus the middle class, is a key trope in economic downturns, amplified by the bankruptcy of General Motors ...

He argues that for the first time, the consuming class is face-to-face with the working class, forcing a societal ...

The American middle class – once a major point of pride in the United States – has changed considerably over the course of recent decades. The typical occupations held by middle-class Americans have ...