Occupy Wall Street protests have spread across the country behind the rallying cry that the “99 percent” have been left behind. There is a sense of outrage that the “system” is not just rigged in favor of the elite – something like the top 1% – but has spun out of control, leading to an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the very few.

Wage stagnation, the explosion of health and education costs as the American welfare state shrinks, and above all the financial manipulation of debt has generated extraordinary profits on Wall Street and massive indebtedness and housing foreclosures on Main Street. Losses from outrageous risk-taking by too-big-to-fail financial institutions are made good by the taxpayer, who is told there is no alternative.

This new gilded age political-economic system can be thought of as the interlocking trifecta of a mostly degraded and increasingly dual educational system, a financial system that became mostly unregulated by either law or social norms, and a political system increasingly corrupted by money.

The educational system has promoted a meritocracy of cumulative advantage. The vast majority of American students experience primary and secondary schools during which they fall far behind their peers in much of the rest of the developed (and even less-developed) world, and then face costs of post-secondary education that produce a level of debt that cannot possibly be repaid out of earnings. But the elite reproduces itself with an ability to pay for college and graduate school educations whose superiority has steadily grown, while at the same time feeling entitled since the educational process has also become extraordinarily competitive.

The financial sector was systematically deregulated as free market orthodoxy took off in the 1980s. This deregulation served to extract resources from the “real” economy and concentrated it in the bank accounts of a tiny elite, who are increasingly those same victors of the Darwinian educational competition. As the concentration of income at the very top of the distribution proceeded in the 1990s-2000s, . . .

Read more: The Metrics of Protest: “99 Percent”