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Study, conducted by Stanford University and released by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University in Nov., 2011... shows a changed map of prosperity in the United States over the past four decades, with larger patches of affluence and poverty and a shrinking middle.... The study also found that there is more residential sorting by income.... It raises, but does not answer, the question of whether increased economic inequality, and the resulting income segregation, impedes social mobility.

Murray ignores economic/government reasons for "collapse of middle class" and focuses only on "social structure"

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the "bottom" 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans. That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market "recovery," artificially propped up by the Fed's interest-rate repression. The United States is broke - fiscally, morally, intellectually - and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.

>"Between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent. For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite's share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains..... >"Few of the 0.1% are in professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone's income and his economic contribution.... [So we] But they should ignore all the propaganda about "job creators" and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes."

"The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year."