By Timothy Noah
The American aristocracy is less different from you and me than it was in Fitzgerald’s day. “Before World War II,” they wrote, “the richest Americans were overwhelmingly rentiers deriving most of their income from wealth holdings (mainly in the form of dividends).” But today, they found, the top of the heap are overwhelmingly job-holders deriving most of their income from their wages. Did it become posh to have a job ? Not exactly. Having a job—the right job, anyway—became the way to get posh. That’s encouraging in one sense: To roll in the dough you now have to work for a living. But it’s discouraging in another sense: You can’t blame enormous income disparities on non-working coupon-clippers who exist outside the wage structure (and reality as most of us understand it). The wage structure itself is grossly misshapen.
