Most Americans stopped looking at what was happening through a variety of coping mechanisms - starting with women entering paid work and then everyone working longer hours and using their homes for raising equity and generating more money through debt. The typical household basically staved off the day of reckoning.

Regardless of how you interpret the facts, you have to come to the conclusion that inequality is widening in the US and in almost every other country.

We're the richest economy in the history of the world. For the majority of Americans not to get the benefits of this extraordinarily prosperous economy, there's something fundamentally wrong.

Socialism for rich bankers and capitalism for everyone else.

We used to be so proud that our country offered far more economic opportunities than the feudal system in Great Britain, with its royal family, princesses and dukes. But social mobility in the UK is higher than in the US. Our social rift is as big as it was in the 1920s.

I am not an economic determinist. If I were, I would throw up my hands; I just would not bother. I think it's wrong to be an economic determinist. I think it's wrong to simply say, "Well, inevitably, if you're poor, you're going to get a lousy education; if you're lower-middle class, the cards are going to be stacked against you, and you'll probably never get anywhere".

No economy can continue to function when the vast middle class and everybody else don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing without going deeper and deeper into debt.