Evan Osnos

Well, for a long time, I think that Americans tolerated, and in fact, in some cases, celebrated inequality or these giant fortunes at the top because they felt like they were the emblems of opportunity.

They kind of substantiated the myth that really is important to the American idea, the idea that you can go from the bottom to the top, the kind of thing that you still do hear from cab drivers on the other side of the world when they hear that you're an American.

Mm-hmm.

But the numbers here at home are very different than what that myth suggests.

I mean, the simple fact is if you're a person who was born in 1940 in this country, you stood a 90% chance of out-earning your parents.

But you fast forward to today and a child who's coming of age today stands less than half that chance of out-earning their parents.

And as a result, there is a feeling of hollowness and of frustration about that mythology.

And so it feels as if this is no longer just a part of the usual ebb and flow of opportunity and fortune, of money concentrating into the hands of a few and then dispersing out more broadly.

And the history on this suggests that at a certain point, people do get frustrated to the point where they don't accept it anymore.

It can feel as if we're approaching some reckoning point.

There's a great historian named Ransom McMullen who studied the fall of Rome.

And what he said was the fall of Rome took 500 years, but you could condense that history into a very concise explanation.

He said, fewer had more.

And in a way, I think that feeling, that recognition that we're beginning to monkey around with the very foundation of America's democratic sustainability has bled out into the broader population to such an extent that that

willingness to celebrate giant fortunes as emblems of opportunity rather than as signs of distress is changing.

And that pendulum, in all the ways we've talked about today, it feels as if it is beginning perhaps to swing in the other direction.