Paul Krugman reminds us that the very real anger and frustration many Americans experience today is rooted in the very real and dramatic decline of opportunity in the land of opportunity.    

“Lately, inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.”

Let that sink in a minute.  America is now a place where prosperity is more often inherited, not earned.  A nation created without a natural aristocracy, like the one in Europe that our founding families fled, is now a place where our children are more likely than their European counterparts to be born into a social class with little hope that our platitudes about a ‘meritocracy’ will translate into a real road to social mobility. 

And it took outsiders, the Occupy Wallstreet folks, to put this issue onto our agenda, because the already powerful would rather focus our attentions elsewhere, ignoring the fact that our leadership, public and private, has failed to deliver on the promise that hard work will pay off in America. 

“So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals….”

Instead, being born a Romney or a Soros is the ticket to success and that is a recipe for killing innovation, undermining American prosperity, even as we know that average worker productivity in America continues to grow faster than anywhere on the planet…without reward.  And it is not only rising worker productivity that stands out as evidence of hard work and discipline, that is, evidence that average workers are not the place to find a morality gap in America.

“...the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-‘90s....

Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: a drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men….”

Living wage jobs, with benefits (provide through work, as we have in the past, or provided through social contract because that is a more cost-effective and business friendly way to provide benefits) have been increasingly scarce since the 1970s, particularly for the angriest constituency today: under-educated white men. 

“For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent….

Back in 1996…Wilson published When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor, in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind.”

This anger is not unfounded, but it is also not founded on a morality crisis in the working class as much as on leadership choosing not to reward worker productivity and discipline and instead choosing to inflate elite wealth in ways that destabilize the economy and communities.  This is the source of the threat to our way of life; this is the moral issue that is our challenge today…recreate living wage jobs with benefits because it is opportunity that spurs innovation and prosperity, not an American aristocracy.