“I have this gnawing feeling about the future of America. When people lose the sense of optimism, things tend to get more volatile. The future I most fear for America is Latin American: a grossly unequal society that is prone to wild swings from populism to orthodoxy, which makes sensible government increasingly hard to imagine. Look at the Tea Party. People think it came from nowhere. While I don’t agree with their remedies, most Tea Party members are middle-class Americans who have been suffering silently for years.”
– Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, quoted in Ed Luce’s outstanding FT Magazine article yesterday on the crisis of middle-class America.
