The Atlantic article The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy is having well over fifteen minutes of fame. Yesterday I read the article, listened to author Matthew Stewart on On Point, and read the rebuttal on slate.com. My interest was piqued because Mr. Stewart resides in Brookline, Massachusetts, the town in which we raised our sons,  which is purportedly a fountainhead of families belonging to this lucky group.

The basic idea is shown clearly in a graph, duplicated below. From the Great Depression to the present, the top 0.1 percent of the population increased its wealth by 12 %, while the lower 90 percent lost 12 %. The 9.9 percent in-between maintained its share at about 55 %.

This graph would be more accurate with population-proportional lines. The black line should be ten times as wide as the top line, while the bottom line should be one-tenth as wide.

This middle group, the New American Aristocrats, or NAAs, is characterized by good family, good health, good schools, good neighborhoods, and good jobs, Five Good Things that lead to lifelong financial comfort for them and their progeny, even though they don’t own private jets. The the NAAs and the 0.1 percent, who have private jets and occasionally buy elections, increasingly monopolize opportunities nationwide, including rapidly-appreciating housing, colleges that fuel advancement rather than debt, and professional jobs with either benefits or salaries hyperbolically higher than the skills required or results produced. Both groups enjoy as much freedom from the ravages of crime/discrimination, addiction, and non-communicable diseases as the Deity will allow. They are for the most part completely unfamiliar with not-a-living-wage jobs, lack of reliable transportation, insufficient savings to cover even the smallest emergency, and broken homes.*

The opposite is true of the lower 90 percent, who often express their discontent with their reduced prospects at the polls.

The adult NAAs are largely Baby Boomers, and this article makes them Angry. Like me, many Boomers were raised in lower income households, had to work as children, maintained good high school grades in order to earn college scholarships, then plied full time jobs for decades. Most of us feel we earned our laurels.

The author doesn’t dispute this. Instead he asks us, which he characterizes as a cohort of progressive, intelligent truth-seekers, his own beloved cohort, to do two things.

First, he wants us to acknowledge the inequality that the numbers document. One representative young woman called into On Point: When she graduated from high school she wanted to become a welder, but her parents convinced her to attend college, and she was proud to be the first in her family to earn a college degree. She also acquired $75,000 in debt. Now in her fourth year of work, she has been sending $400/month in loan payments, and she has yet to even start paying down the principle. It’s a trap, she said, just managing to keep her voice steady as she described her bleak future.

This struck my heart. I remember making a decision to refinance our home rather than burden our sons with excessive loans when our college savings came up short. While we did work to purchase our home, and to save for college, perhaps we were able to do so because both of us benefitted from the Five Good Things growing up, as well as the higher mobility available under a more equitable income distribution.

The second thing Stewart asks of NAAs is that we think about how the problem could be solved. No blame, no shame, just real equality of opportunity for everyone in the future. Whether or not you agree with his premise, and slate.com makes some salient counterpoints, less inequality and more mobility is better for everyone, and for democracy.

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* The single parent rate among NAAs is less than 10 %.