comments_image Comments  Paul Krugman: We Could End This
Depression Right Now  The Nobel laureate talks about Washington,
Europe and the bizarre alternate universe inhabited by deficit
fear-mongering media and political elites.  Continued from
previous page    • submit to reddit   • submit to reddit  JH:
Let me turn you to another topic. We’ve seen stagnant middle-
class wage growth for basically a generation. There are all
sorts of theories popular in conservative think tanks about why
this is either a myth or a really good thing. You wrote a piece
recently about how income inequality is driving what one might
call “political inequality” -- one follows the other. Can you
unpack that idea for us?  PK: First it starts with an
observation. Inequality has had its ups and downs. We were a
very unequal society before the Great Depression. We became a
much more equal society during the 1930s and especially during
the 1940s. We stayed middle-class for a while, then became
unequal again. Political polarization, which