Afternoon Must-Read: David Cay Johnston on Our Unequal Neo-Upstairs, Downstairs Economy

Paul Krugman: Upstairs, Downstairs, Outside:

Via Mark Thoma, David Cay Johnston has a great piece noting that today’s service economy is in many ways like the Edwardian-era economy in which a small number of wealthy people employed a large number of servants — except that we tend to outsource the service, relying on restaurants and cleaning services instead of cooks and maids. And our outsourced servants are, he notes, arguably paid and treated worse than the in-house servants of the past, even in absolute terms–let alone relative to per capita GDP. It’s a novel and useful way to think about just how unequal our society has grown.