The Paradox of the New Elite

The New York Times
Sunday Review
By ALEXANDER STILLE
Published: October 22, 2011
Alexander Stille is a professor of international journalism at Columbia.

IT’S a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.
At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.
The two shifts are each huge and hugely important: one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/opinion/sunday/social-inequality-and-the-new-elite.html?_r=1