How much do you blame elites for the problems you discuss?
It’s quite clear to me, especially in the United States, that both the political and the financial elites have used their power to extract what political scientists and economists call rents.
Which is to say, they rig the rules in such a way that they benefit while everybody else is harmed. I think one obvious example is that it used to be that capital income, from investments, for example, was taxed much more than active income from going to work and getting a paycheck. Now capital gains are taxed at a much, much lower rate than going to work for a living. And even if you have reasonably conservative values, even if you think that we shouldn’t do too much redistribution but we should reward people’s effort, that is a very strange system. Obviously this is only one small example of myriad ways in which we’ve set up the system in such a way that relatively few people manage to capture a vast share of the gains from economic growth.