So let's talk about education. I've got two graphs I want to share: One on the cost of college and one on the value of college. The cost of college is rising about six percent a year, at some points even faster than overall health care spending. In the next decade, as states cut financing for public schools, tuition at public four- and two-year schools will rise even faster than they have in the last few decades. Here's what that looks like:





value of college has never been clearer.

But just as college costs are rising faster than either inflation or middle class wages, theof college has never been clearer. Here's an eye-opening graph on the education premium:

Every statistic tells the same story: If you want to earn more, learn more. Between 1973 and 2007, real wages fell 15 percent for non high-school grads; stayed flat for high school grads and workers with "some college"; and rose 18 percent for both college grads and advanced degree grads. Upshot: Just as the cost of college has become prohibitive for many families, the benefits of college have only increased.

One story you could tell about income inequality is that in the last 30 years, technology and globalization have commoditized lower-middle class jobs. Technology ate into manufacturing work that could be done by robots, while globalization nibbled into menial service jobs that could be done by cheaper countries. (Domestically, you could argue that immigration, free trade, and anti-union sentiment have also gutted middle income jobs.)

The bottom and middle floors of the labor market aren't as plush as they used to be, so workers need education to ride to the higher stories. And there's the Catch-22. Although getting on the elevator has never been more important, getting a college degree also never been more prohibitively expensive after 30 years of flat wages falling behind education inflation.

I'm with Matt Yglesias, who writes that it's hasty to blame the nation's financiers for literally stealing from the middle class' wages. It seems much more likely to me that a smorgasbord of both conscious public policy decisions (like outsourcing, free trade agreements, and low interest rates) and unintended phenomena (rising education and health care costs) combine to make the rich richer and the poor no richer.

