There's been no shortage of coverage lately of the American middle class. President Barack Obama and his GOP challenger Mitt Romney have made it the centerpiece of their respective campaigns, a fact that came up repeatedly in Wednesday night's debate in Denver.
But the plight of the middle class is also moving far beyond the day-to-day chatter of the news cycle.
Case in point: a new book by Hedrick Smith, called Who Stole the American Dream, which is resonating in literary and economic circles of the country.
Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist, and he attacks his topic with gusto.
Here's the big idea: the decline of the middle class did not happen by accident.
Instead, Smith argues, in the late 1970s a group of powerful corporate and government interests came together to influence policies that ultimately hurt millions of Americans.
He calls it "wedge economics."
This phenomenon was a "change in the business ethos," Smith says. And it really took off in the 1980s when many CEOs moved from a shared system of taking care of all of their stakeholders (investors and workers), to one where equity-based inequality became the norm (big money for the bosses).
Here's a taste of Smith's argument:
And here's a video of how Smith explained the idea recently — in great detail — to the New America Foundation: