File: Protesters listen to speeches at the "Occupy Wall Street" protest in from of the Washington, D.C. on October 6, 2011. (Photo by Linda Davidson / The Washington Post)
One of the striking stories in the American economy over the last several decades is just how much the incomes of the super-rich have grown, compared to the incomes of everyone else.
But what if that the focus on those super-rich - the top 1 percent of all earners - has overshadowed a larger, more troubling gap: the widening one between college graduates and workers whose education stopped after high school?
That's the argument MIT economist David Autor makes in a brief research paper out Thursday - that "the growth of skill differentials among the 'other 99 percent' is arguably even more consequential than the rise of the 1% for the welfare of most citizens."
By Autor's calculations, if you'd taken all the income gains that flowed to the 1 percent over the last 35 years and redistributed them evenly to everyone else in the economy, that would have delivered an extra $7,100 a year to every household in the bottom 99 percent. That's a lot of money. But it's not as much as the growing pay differential between workers who went to college and those who didn't.
In the last 35 years, he calculates, the so-called college premium - the boost in your paycheck from earning a diploma - increased by $28,000, adjusted for inflation. So if you took that entire increase and redistributed it to non-college workers, you'd be giving them a raise four times the size of the 1 percent redistribution.
As he described it in an interview: