ABSTRACT
The rise of nonworking poverty and the decline in the prime-age employment ratio have led to renewed calls to provide public-sector jobs of last resort, new efforts to ensure that anti-poverty programs successfully promote labor force attachment and new experiments with unconditional cash transfers to those in poverty. As important as the decline in income inequality was, the modernization narrative was more concerned with trends in inequalities of opportunity. There was a precipitous decline in income inequality in the 1930s, and thereafter the United States experienced approximately thirty years of stability in income inequality. The final component of the modernization narrative has one's social class becoming a less important and encompassing identity. The "rent narrative" instead rests on the view that extreme inequality should be partly attributed to the many opportunities to collect rent. The foregoing narratives thus constitute a sea change relative to the sensibilities that prevailed after Second World War and even into the 1960s and 1970s.
