Paul Krugman queixa-se da falta de prosperidade

The Conscience of a Liberal"My generation grew up in a nation of strong democratic values and broadly shared prosperity. But both those values and that shared prosperity have been slipping away."We can reverse that trend. Political and economic reform turned the oligarchic America of the Gilded Age, a place of vast inequality, bigotry, and corruption, into the imperfect but far better society of the postwar era. The challenge now is to do again what the New Deal did: to create institutions that will support and sustain a decent society."

— Paul KrugmanSeptember 18, 2007, 11:45 pm Introducing This Blog

“I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted – in fact, like many in my generation I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.”

That’s the opening paragraph of my new book, The Conscience of a Liberal. It’s a book about what has happened to the America I grew up in and why, a story that I argue revolves around the politics and economics of inequality.

I’ve given this New York Times blog the same name, because the politics and economics of inequality will, I expect, be central to many of the blog posts – although I also expect to be posting on a lot of other issues, from health care to high-speed Internet access, from productivity to poll analysis. Many of the posts will be supplements to my regular columns; I’ll be using this space to present the kind of information I can’t provide on the printed page – especially charts and tables, which are crucial to the way I think about most of the issues I write about.

In fact, let me start this blog off with a chart that’s central to how I think about the big picture, the underlying story of what’s really going on in this country. The chart shows the share of the richest 10 percent of the American population in total income – an indicator that closely tracks many other measures of economic inequality – over the past 90 years, as estimated by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. I’ve added labels indicating four key periods. [...]