Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Alan Greenspan has concerns about extreme economic inequality for that same reason, but in a somewhat different spirit. In the 2000s he was asked about the problem. “Inequality is increasing,” he said. “You cannot have the benefits of capitalist market growth without the support of a significant proportion and indeed virtually all the people, and if you have an increasing sense that the rewards of capitalism are being distributed unjustly, the system will not stand.” For Greenspan, however, the problem isn’t extreme inequality per se, or the newly extreme inequality between the great majority and the rich, but rather the envy of the poor for the middle class. And his proposed solution to that, honest to God, was to contrive to pay middle-class workers even less, to bring their incomes down closer to those of the poor. We pay the highest skilled-labor wages in the world. If we would open up our borders to skilled labor far more than we do, we would…suppress the wage levels of the skilled….If we bring in a number of workers to suppress the level of wages [of the skilled] relative to the lesser-skilled, we will reduce the degree of inequality.