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Anyone following the news knows income inequality is at the front of political debate.
New findings from Pew Research Center show that the middle class has been in steady decline since 1971, and that while median incomes for the middle class have risen 34% since 1970, upper income households have seen a 47% increase. Since 1971, each decade has a decrease in the number of middle-income households, and no one decade signals a rapid decline.
Is the shrinking middle class a critical indication that income inequality is not going away, or is in fact getting worse? What does income inequality actually mean for the economy, or show about the economy?
To get some of these answers, I talked with Steven Kaplan, the Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is also the director of Booth’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and a co-founder of the New Venture Challenge, ranked in 2015 as the nation’s number one accelerator program.
Professor Kaplan earned his PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University, and on top of his work at Booth, he is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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