If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?

At Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, a link to “Graduates Versus Oligarchs”:

Say, rather, that five things are going on:

• The rise of a very powerful, successful, exploitative upper class.
• Further increases in inequality as the tax and transfer system becomes less progressive.
• Increases in risk that threaten to move middle-class families sharply downward in the wealth distribution.
• Skill-biased technical change that sharply raises the benefits to education.
• Holes in the safety net—the fall in the value of the minimum wage, time-limited welfare, and so forth.