Chrystia Freeland

The world, particularly the world economy, is pretty vulnerable at the moment. The recent French and Greek elections, and Germany’s unpredictable response to their results, have again raised the specter of a crisis in the euro zone that Robert Rubin, a former secretary of the U.S. Treasury, told me this week could be far worse than the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Nor is everything fine in the United States, where disappointing job numbers for April have set off fears that the economic recovery may be weakening.

Yet, at a time when the global economy is so fragile, and in a year when it had been billed as the only election issue that matters, the United States has spent the week focused on same-sex marriage, which President Barack Obama explicitly endorsed on Wednesday after a dance of the seven veils by other members of his administration.

This focus on social issues when so much else is awry can be perplexing to outsiders: Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir V. Putin’s press secretary, memorably sneered about the mixed-up U.S. priorities in a recent conversation with David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker.

But the often contradictory interplay between social policies and economic ones is the underlying dynamic that today drives U.S. politics. The party that juggles the two agendas most adeptly will be the one that wins the White House in November.

To understand what is going on, you have to go back to the 1960s. Since then, two big political shifts have reshaped U.S. society, politics and economics. The first is the vast expansion of individual rights and liberties. Women, ethnic minorities and, although not completely, gay men and lesbians, fought their way into the public arena. This tremendous social transformation was championed by the left, and it has largely succeeded.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, a second big shift was taking place. This was the Reagan Revolution in economic policy, which brought cuts in taxes and in regulation and a weakening of unions and the social welfare safety net. This transformation was championed by the right, and it, too, has largely won the day.

These two different victories are the back story to the big political dramas of today. They are the reason that the left and the right both feel cheated and aggrieved, and both want to win back a country they feel has been stolen from them. The right wants to win back the country from the left’s social revolution; the left wants to win it back from the right’s economic revolution.

They are also why, even as the distance between left and right has increased, the fault lines within the two parties have deepened, too. For many Americans, supporting a party that advocates both their vested economic interests and their social preferences has become hard to do.

Thomas Frank dubbed this the “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” problem in his 2004 book of the same title. Frank’s point was that the Republican Party had won support for its economic policies from the lower middle class by backing that group’s conservative social preferences. These people were so strongly opposed to the liberal social agenda imposed by coastal elites that they were willing to back the party that fought it, even if that meant voting against their economic self-interest.

Frank’s book deserved its best-seller status. But it should be read alongside a phantom companion volume titled, “What’s the Matter with Palo Alto?” or “What’s the Matter with the Upper West Side?”

That’s because, for the sake of the social values they hold dear, many members of the affluent coastal elite were willing to back a party whose policies went against their vested economic interests: the Democrats. That trade-off was particularly evident in 2008, when some of the leading lights on Wall Street, a community that has historically been staunchly Republican, defected to Barack Obama.

These awkward marriages of social and economic issues are again dominating the 2012 race. The “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” paradox was at play in the campaign of Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator and Republican runner-up, who portrayed himself as the candidate of the working man and also espoused an extremely conservative social agenda.

Winning over their own economically conflicted constituents has been harder for the Democrats: The financial crisis and its aftermath have weakened the fragile alliance between the 1 percent and the left. It is one thing to support a highly educated leader whose very biography embodies the socially liberal convictions of your class at a time when the economy is booming and George W. Bush’s tax cuts are still in place. It is quite another to back that same president when he is pledging to target beloved tax loopholes with the Buffett Rule.

Here is where same-sex marriage comes in. This is a cause strongly advocated by young voters and committed progressives, two important groups in the Obama base. But it also turns out to be an issue with tremendous traction within the highly educated, individual-rights-based 1 percent.

As the NBC journalist Chuck Todd put it earlier this week, “gay money in this election has replaced Wall Street money. It has been the gay community that has put in money in a way to this president that is a very, very important part of the fund-raising operation for President Obama’s campaign.”

The good news for Obama, and the political logic behind his statement of personal conviction this week, is that “gay money” and “Wall Street money” can be one and the same. As Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York demonstrated in his push for same-sex marriage last year, even billionaires with strongly conservative economic views, like the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, whose son is gay, are willing to back Democrats on what they see as an issue of fundamental human rights.

America used to be Sweden: According to new research, the America of the Founding Fathers was ‘‘more egalitarian than anywhere else in the measurable world.’’

That’s an important finding, and one that will surprise most Americans today. Both inequality and American exceptionalism are high on the national political agenda. One idea that brings those issues together is the belief that Americans have an exceptional cultural tolerance for income inequality. Unlike Europeans, the thinking goes, most Americans are confident that they are ‘‘soon to be rich.’’ As a result, the conventional wisdom has it, Americans in the middle look up to their 1 percent and are loath to tax them.

But historical research by the economists Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson shows that when it comes to inequality, this American exceptionalism is an inversion of the conditions that prevailed at the time of American Revolution. In that era, which is so often invoked in today’s political and social battles, America was the world’s most egalitarian society – and proud to be so.

‘‘There has been an absolute reversal,’’ Lindert told me. ‘‘Compared to any other country from which we have data, America in that era was more equal. Today, the Americans are the outliers in the other direction.’’

Nowadays, we think of the postwar era as a halcyon time for the U.S. middle class. But it turns out that, in relative terms, colonial America, too, was a great country for the 99 percent, particularly when compared with the folks back in the old country.

‘‘Americans who were free were very well-off, and better off than their counterparts in the mother country,’’ Lindert said. ‘‘Every kind of person by occupation was better off than their counterpart by occupation. The carpenters, the shopkeepers and so forth all had a slightly better income than in the mother country.’’

Slavery is America’s original sin and was the great global injustice of that age. But on a purely economic basis, even when slaves are included in the calculation of inequality, America comes out as the most egalitarian.

‘‘If one includes slaves in the overall income distribution, the American colonies in 1774 were still the most equal in their distribution of income among households, though by a finer margin,’’ Lindert said.

Members of only one group fared better in Europe than their peers in the colonies – the people at the very top.

‘‘The Duke of Bedford had no counterpart in America,’’ Lindert said. ‘‘Even the richest Charleston slave owner could not match the wealth of the landed aristocracy.’’ Indeed, England’s 1 percent were so rich that the country’s average national income was nearly as high as that of the colonies, despite the markedly greater prosperity of what today we might call the American middle class.

Today, the opposite is true, Lindert said: ‘‘The rest of the world can’t come close to the 1 percent in America.’’

This portrait of colonial America as the world’s great egalitarian exception would probably come as a surprise to most Yanks today. But though Lindert and Williamson provide us with new data, the portrait they paint fits with contemporary accounts.

In a letter he wrote from Monticello in 1814, Thomas Jefferson applauded America’s economic equality. ‘‘We have no paupers,’’ he wrote to Thomas Cooper, an Anglo-American polymath and frequent Jefferson correspondent. ‘‘The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.’’

By contrast, Jefferson believed, as the Lindert and Williamson research confirms, that members of America’s 1 percent were worse off than their European counterparts:

‘‘The wealthy, on the other hand, and those at their ease, know nothing of what the Europeans call luxury. They have only somewhat more of the comforts and decencies of life than those who furnish them.’’

Interestingly, particularly in view of today’s inequality wars, Jefferson didn’t pull his punches about which social order was preferable. ‘‘Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?’’ he opined about egalitarian America, and then did a little calculation showing that the overall happiness of Americans far outweighed that of the English, for whom ‘‘happiness is the lot of the aristocracy only.’’

It wasn’t just the Americans who perceived their society to be more economically equal than the Old World. Foreign visitors noticed, too. After his famous journey to America in the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville returned home to France to report that ‘‘nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions among people.’’

But what was obvious just before the Revolution has been largely forgotten today. ‘‘It was known by them at the time,’’ Lindert said. ‘‘Now we as a society may have lost sight of that, because we didn’t have the numbers to remind us.’’

Thanks to Lindert and Williamson, we now do. Their historical work makes a particularly important contribution to the current debate because, as chance would have it, those who argue that inequality is as American as apple pie tend also to hold the views of the Founders in particularly high regard.

‘‘I see it as a puzzle,’’ Lindert said. ‘‘Those of us who insist that inequality is fine would also invoke a Founding Fathers’ society for which it was not true.’’

Equality, not just of opportunity but also of outcome, turns out to be one of the features that really did make the United States exceptional in the age when the country was born. That startling fact is worth bearing in mind as Americans struggle to figure out how to remain exceptional in an altogether more complicated era.

More bad news for the middle class: When the economy recovers, jobs in the middle won’t. That is the conclusion of an important new study that connects a long-term trend in the labor market with the business cycle of recession and rebound.

Nir Jaimovich, an economist at Duke University, and Henry E. Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, take as their starting point one of the most important continuing changes in Western developed societies. That shift is what economists, most notably David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have called the ‘‘polarization’’ of the job market. Maarten Goos and Alan Manning, extending the research to Britain, have more colorfully dubbed it the dual rise of ‘‘lousy and lovely’’ jobs.

Their point is that, thanks to technology, more and more ‘‘routine’’ tasks can be done by machines. The most familiar example is the increasing automation of manufacturing. But machines can now do ‘‘routine’’ white-collar jobs, too — things like the work that used to be performed by travel agents and much of the legal ‘‘discovery’’ that was done by relatively well-paid associates with expensive law degrees.

The jobs that are left are the ‘‘lovely’’ ones, at the top of the income distribution – white-collar jobs that cannot be done by machines, like designing computer software or structuring complex financial transactions. A lot of ‘‘lousy’’ jobs are not affected by the technology revolution, either – nonroutine, manual tasks like collecting the garbage or peeling and chopping onions in a restaurant kitchen.

An extensive body of economic research has shown that job polarization is happening throughout the Western developed world. It accounts for many of the social and political strains we have experienced over the past three decades, particularly the increasing divide between the people at the top and at the bottom of the economic heap, and the disappearance of those in the middle who were once both the compass and the backbone of our societies.

What’s new about Jaimovich and Siu’s work is that they have found that job polarization isn’t a slow, evolutionary process. Instead, it happens in short, sharp bursts. The middle-class frog isn’t being gradually boiled; it is being periodically grilled at a very high heat. Those spurts of change are economic downturns: Jaimovich and Siu have found that in the United States since the mid-1980s, 92 percent of job loss in middle-skill occupations has happened within 12 months of a recession.

‘‘We think of recessions as temporary, but they lead to these permanent changes,’’ Siu told me. ‘‘The big puzzle about business cycles is: Why have we had these jobless recoveries over the past three recessions? These jobless recoveries are because you have these middle-skilled jobs that are being wiped off the table.’’

Economists are often in the business of collecting empirical evidence of the trends many of us civilians have long experienced in our daily lives. That turned out to be the case when Siu shared his research findings with his family.

‘‘I told my father-in-law, who used to be an executive in the oil industry,’’ Siu said. ‘‘He said: ‘That is exactly what happened. Every vice-president had a secretary, then they fired them during the recession. But after the recession we had to pair up, and two vice-presidents had to share one secretary.’’’

Another example may have been hinted at in the March U.S. jobs report. Those figures showed a decline of 34,000 jobs in the retail sector despite recent improvements in store sales. Some economists attributed that apparent mismatch to the power of technology, in this case e-commerce.

‘‘That is certainly in line with our findings,’’ Siu said. ‘‘Salespeople are one of the prime examples of routine jobs.’’

The Jaimovich-Siu paper concludes that ‘‘jobless recoveries are evident in only the three most recent recessions, and they are due entirely to jobless recoveries in routine occupations. In this group, employment never recovers beyond its trough level, nor does it come anywhere close to its pre-recession peak.’’

This is, Siu told me, ‘‘a stark finding.’’ David E. Altig, the research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, who has written a blog post about the paper, echoed that view. ‘‘One of the things you certainly note is that this is the mother of all jobless recoveries,’’ he told me.

Siu urged me not to be too gloomy. ‘‘In the broad sweep of history, technology is good,’’ he reminded me. ‘‘We’ve been wrestling with this for 200 years. Remember the Luddites.’’

That is an important point. All of us, even the hollowed-out middle class, would be much worse off if the Luddites had won the day and the Industrial Revolution, whose latest wave is the past three and a half decades of technological change, had never taken hold.

But it is also true that every seismic shift, including the current one, has winners and losers. And for the losers, adapting to today’s world of lousy and lovely jobs may be even harder than it was for the artisans of the Luddite era to thrive in the Machine Age.

‘‘What might be different today is two factors,’’ Siu told me. ‘‘The pace of technological change is so much faster, and we live in such a complex society, that it is harder than ever to switch to a new occupation.’’

All of us are awaiting an economic recovery. We should be braced for one that offers scant comfort to the middle class.

It turns out you can govern in 140 characters. Social media is often accused of coarsening our public discourse and of making us stupid. But some innovative public leaders are taking to their keyboards and finding that the payoff is a direct and personal connection with their communities.

To understand how statecraft by Twitter works, I spoke to three avid practitioners, who are spread around the globe and work at different levels of government: Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden; Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia; and Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, Alberta.

Bildt is a veteran blogger, but he was dubious about Web 2.0, as the social-media revolution is sometimes called. “I was rather skeptical on Twitter,” he told me. “I thought, ‘What can you say in 140 characters?’”

But Bildt, who has more than 116,000 followers , soon found Twitter to be “very useful” and also “fun.”

“As a matter of fact, you can say something in 140 characters,” he said. “The restriction isn’t as absolute as I had thought.”

One way Bildt uses Twitter is promote his bigger-think pieces. “A lot of the tweets are links,” he said. “If I write an op-ed, then I can tweet it.”

Bildt combines his Twitter posts with a blog. Twitter is for links and instant comments; the blog is for longer, more considered arguments. Bildt tweets in English and blogs in Swedish.

One of Bildt’s followers is McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. He likes the way Bildt mixes life and work, one moment tweeting about Syria and the next gently complaining about the long line for takeoff at the Istanbul airport.

“The thing I feel most nervous about is blending the personal and the professional,” McFaul said. “That’s new to me. I’m learning where the lines are.”

For instance, McFaul, who is originally from Bozeman, Montana, posted a picture of himself and his wife dancing to country music played by a Montana band in Spaso House, the ambassador’s residence in Moscow.

“I never would have done that three years ago,” McFaul said. “And yet the guys say any time there is something personal or something with a photo or video it gets much more pickup or retweets than a statement on Syria.”

“The guys” to whom McFaul refers are the U.S. State Department’s social-media team, led by Alec Ross, who is the senior adviser on innovation for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state. Ross spearheads the State Department’s enthusiastic social-media campaign. As McFaul posted earlier this week, quoting Mrs. Clinton: “Our ambassadors are blogging and tweeting, and every embassy has a social-media presence.” (Indeed, Ross’s influence is global – Bildt said that the American briefed the Swedish diplomatic corps at its annual meeting last summer.)

Like Bildt, McFaul has a multilingual, multiplatform social-media strategy. McFaul is a Twitter newbie. (In just over two months, he has about 850 posts and more than 22,700 followers.) He blogs when he has a more complicated point to make and uses Facebook when he wants to converse with a community. He tries to write mostly in Russian, but occasionally uses the Latin alphabet if his Cyrillic keyboard isn’t handy, and will post in English if he wants to communicate with his followers outside Russia.

Bildt has found that by integrating social media into his normal routines – he writes blog posts in the car or on the plane and “has it in the back of my mind all the time” – “it is not so time-consuming.”

For McFaul, who is writing chiefly in a foreign language, social media amounts to a second shift: “I have my day job as a conventional ambassador, and then starting at 10 p.m. until I get tired I interact on social media.”

McFaul’s moonlighting role as social-media ambassador has particular relevance in Russia, where the government controls much of the traditional media, especially television, and civil society has moved to the Internet in response. As a result, McFaul says, social media is more than a tool for communication – it is also a well positioned window into the national debate.

McFaul’s social-media outreach has not protected him from controversy. Indeed, Russian leaders, including President-elect Vladimir V. Putin, have been suspicious from the outset of McFaul, who is a longtime student and occasional advocate of democratization. Just this week, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov accused McFaul of arrogance for remarks made to a Russian news agency about missile defense.

But his social-media presence has given McFaul the tools to reach beyond the sometimes hostile national media and speak to any Russians who care to listen.

Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, couldn’t operate in a more different environment. He is an elected leader in a Western democracy. But he, too, has found that social media gives him the power to get his message across directly, without relying on mainstream media platforms.

Nenshi has a salty style – he once said on Twitter that a critic should “look into pharmaceuticals” for his “limpness” issue – that has earned him more than 53,000 Twitter followers, including foreign fans who say if they lived in Calgary they would vote for Nenshi.

In a city of just over 1 million, that gives the mayor a loud and independent megaphone.

“The really interesting piece about all of this is the way it disintermediates the traditional media,” Nenshi said. “I’m well on my way to having more Twitter followers than one of the Calgary newspapers has readers. It puts my interactions with the media in a new light.”

Chalk one up for continental Europe’s economic architects. For the past several decades, the Anglo-Saxon consensus was that state interference in the private-sector economy was a mistake. Government bureaucrats were in no position to pick economic winners and losers – and if standing aside meant letting the forces of creative destruction sweep away entire industries, so be it.

The continental Europeans, most successfully the Germans, demurred. They were unconvinced that the shift from manufacturing to services was either good or inevitable, and they used the full might of the state to try to hang on to their industrial base. The financial crisis may have briefly felt like a vindication of this model – but the near collapse and continued frailty of the euro brought a quick end to that moment of schadenfreude.

When it comes to manufacturing, though, the European approach is being embraced in the White House. In a speech this week, Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council and assistant to the president for economic policy, laid out the economic rationale for the U.S. shift. When I spoke to him afterward, Sperling was careful to point out that the new approach did not amount to industrial policy, or an attempt by the government to pick winners and losers.

But the White House has come to believe, Sperling said, that manufacturers more broadly should be first among equals. Giving manufacturers slightly lower taxes and more support for their research and development is a good idea, Sperling argues, for two reasons. First, because manufacturing has a particularly powerful spillover effect on the rest of the economy.

The benign effect of manufacturing Sperling is most enthusiastic about is the connection with innovation. That link, he argues, has been drawn out in research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Production in the Innovation Economy” initiative. Its premise, which Sperling embraces, is that in most new technologies, innovation happens most quickly and effectively when the inventors work close to the builders.

Apple is today the most beloved – and financially successful – U.S. manufacturer of physical stuff. But Sperling’s argument amounts to an assertion that the Apple approach – with designers and engineers in California and factories in China – works for the IT business, but not for much else. In most industries, Sperling contends, those who outsource manufacturing will soon find that they have outsourced their innovative edge, too.

The second pillar of the White House approach is to insist that the decline of U.S. manufacturing, and, by extension, manufacturing in the rich Western economies, is not inevitable. Manufacturing, Sperling argues, is not the agriculture of the 21st century, a sector fated to provide fewer and fewer jobs over time.

Instead, Sperling believes that the United States has a chance to bring jobs back home. “The degree that the U.S. is becoming more and more competitive in bringing manufacturing facilities and jobs back to our shores is very encouraging,” Sperling told me in an interview this week after he gave his speech. This is clearly one of the administration’s talking points this season – on Wednesday, Vice-President Joe Biden trumpeted the rise of “in-sourcing” in a campaign-flavored speech in Iowa.

This White House’s view that the government can – and must – support manufacturing relative to other businesses is a profound shift in the conventional wisdom of the English-speaking world. Since the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the received transatlantic wisdom has been that state intervention is an inevitable failure, that the decline of manufacturing is inevitable, too, and that service-sector jobs can be just as good anyway. The shiny towers of the City of London and the canyons of Wall Street are evidence of that last conviction and, at least for a while, seemed to be a vindication of it as well.

Sperling is an earnest technocrat, and his speech this week was a determined effort to document the intellectual foundations of the White House’s pro-manufacturing tilt. “Let me begin by acknowledging upfront that this is an area where otherwise like-minded economists disagree,” Sperling said at the start of his remarks. His goal is not so much to convince his listeners that he is right as it is to assure them that his approach is intellectually respectable.

But for all its nerdy leanings, the White House is not the Harvard faculty club, and an election is coming up. Manufacturing could be an area of strong contrast between President Barack Obama and his most likely challenger, Mitt Romney. Romney has more hands-on experience, but Obama may have a more deft popular touch.

Unless you have a doctorate in economics, your intuition probably accords with Sperling’s point that building things is essential to a country’s economic well-being. Romney, who opposed the bailout of the Detroit carmakers, often finds himself on the other side of that argument.

Inside the United States, the big political story this week is the Supreme Court’s deliberations on the legality of Obama’s healthcare overhaul. Elsewhere, that is a barely comprehensible local story – all other rich countries provide some version of universal coverage and spend less money and achieve better outcomes than the United States.

But from Berlin to Beijing, the debate about manufacturing and whether governments have a duty to support it is a live issue. That is one more reason this U.S. election campaign matters so much to the rest of the world.

We know now that trickle-down economics doesn’t really work – the past decade in the United States has seen incomes at the very top soar, while the earnings of the middle class stagnated or declined. But a growing body of academic research is suggesting that this benign force’s wicked stepsister, a phenomenon two economists have dubbed ‘‘trickle-down consumption,’’ is having a powerful impact on the economy and politics of the United States.

The idea is that income inequality has a significant impact on the 99 percent: It drives the rest of us to consume more, whether we can afford to or not.

Robert H. Frank, an economist at Cornell University, is a pioneering student of this behavior who has been writing about the subject for nearly two decades, long before it became fashionable. Frank, who is the co-author of two economics textbooks with the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, believes that rising income inequality affects the rest of us through what he calls ‘‘expenditure cascades.’’

Rising income inequality, he notes, isn’t just about the gap between the 99 percent and the 1 percent; it is also about growing differences across the income distribution, including at the very top. The result is that all of us see people we think of as our peers earning – and spending – a lot more. As a consequence, we find ourselves spending more, too.

‘‘The main idea is that frames of reference are very local,’’ Frank said. ‘‘Bertrand Russell said beggars don’t envy millionaires, they envy other beggars who have a few more coins than they do. Expenditure cascades aren’t because the poor want to emulate the rich.’’

Instead, he argues, each of us imitates those near us – and the result is a cascade of unaffordable consumption.

‘‘There has been extraordinary growth in the 1 percent,’’ Frank said. ‘‘Ordinary people don’t want to emulate them, but what happens is that the people who are next to them want to emulate them, and so on. That social cascade ultimately explains why the middle-class home got 50 percent bigger in the past three decades.’’ (Frank says that the average U.S. house went from 1,570 square feet, or 146 square meters, in 1970 to 2,300 square feet in 2007.)

This cascading increase in consumption can have what some of us might consider to be benign effects – everyone working harder and more women entering the workforce. But it can also have malign ones. In ‘‘Expenditure Cascades,’’ a paper Frank wrote with Adam Seth Levine and Oege Dijk, the three show that more bankruptcies, a higher divorce rate and longer commutes all correlate with increased income inequality.

A draft study by two University of Chicago economists that is attracting a lot of attention in the academy supports this view. Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse coined the term ‘‘trickle-down consumption,’’ and in their paper of the same name they find that higher spending, bankruptcy and self-reported financial distress all increase if you live in a community with higher income inequality, compared with one with lower income inequality.

The concepts of ‘‘trickle-down consumption’’ and ‘‘expenditure cascades’’ help to explain one of the great mysteries of the past decade in U.S. politics and society. Income inequality has been on the rise since the late 1970s, but it is only since the financial crisis that it has gained any real traction in public life. That may be because increased consumption masked growing inequality. Retail therapy meant the 99 percent didn’t notice that the 1 percent was pulling away.

Bertrand and Morse offer empirical evidence of an important explanation for why that was possible. In areas with higher income inequality, politicians were more likely to support measures to make consumer credit cheaper and more available. People weren’t talking about inequality much before 2009, but they felt it. And, America being a democracy, the political system worked to soften it. Interestingly, because inequality grew at a time when overt redistribution was falling out of favor, politicians made it easier to borrow.

If you think the American middle class had too much debt before the crisis, and if you buy the notions of expenditure cascades and trickle-down consumption, the bad news is that the cycle may be about to start all over again. Ipsos MediaCT, a research firm, does a monthly poll of a group it describes as ‘‘the affluents,’’ people with a household income of more than $100,000. Their February survey, released this week, showed this group is poised to hit the malls.

‘‘We have seen for some time what people call frugal fatigue,’’ said Steve Kraus, chief research and insights officer for Ipsos MediaCT. ‘‘Last month it jumped up from about a quarter to a third. They want to revisit the glory days of 2005 or 2006, when they could just buy something nice and treat themselves and not worry about it.’’

But credit is a lot tighter today than it was before 2008, so how will those who aren’t affluent cope when consumption at the top again becomes conspicuous? The alternative to easy credit for the poor is higher taxes for the rich. Surprisingly, Kraus found that his affluent respondents were willing to pay up. Nearly 60 percent were in favor of higher taxes for the rich and nearly 40 percent sympathized with Occupy Wall Street.

“The past 40 years have been the best 40 years for rich people in the history of rich people,’’ Kraus said. ‘‘There is a recognition that we’ve had a pretty good run and now something has got to be done.’’

Even at the very top, though, there turns out to be a class divide. Households with an income of more than $250,000 are far less supportive of higher taxes and more hostile to Occupy Wall Street.

‘‘When you get to the really high-end folks, you get more of a strident conservative,’’ Kraus said. ‘‘More of a crowd that says: ‘Cut spending rather than raising taxes.’’’ Consumption may trickle down, but when it comes to the very top, ideas don’t climb up.

With hindsight, we may find that the 2016 U.S. presidential race began last week, when Hillary Rodham Clinton made a politically electrifying point. ‘‘Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me,’’ she said at the Women in the World conference in New York. ‘‘But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women.’’

At a time when birth control has re-emerged as a political issue in the United States, 94 years after the first legal ruling to permit it, Clinton’s comments were an inspiring rallying cry for worried American women. But what about the mystery she identified? Why, as the secretary of state asserted, do extremists, from the Taliban to conservative Christians, want to control women?

An intriguing new study by two professors at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto suggests a possible answer. (Disclosure: I am on the school’s Dean’s Advisory Board.) Soo Min Toh and Geoffrey Leonardelli didn’t set out to discover why extremists want to control women. Their question was more familiar: Why aren’t there more female leaders?

Toh and Leonardelli argue that women are held back by ‘‘tight’’ cultures and can emerge more easily as leaders in ‘‘loose’’ cultures. ‘‘Tight’’ cultures are ones that have clear, rigid rules about how people should behave and impose tough sanctions on those who color outside the lines. Socially conformist, homogeneous societies like Japan, Malaysia, Norway and Pakistan are tight cultures.

Tight cultures, Toh and Leonardelli believe, hold women back because ‘‘cultural tightness provokes a resistance to changing the traditional and widespread view that leadership is masculine.’’

Loose cultures, by contrast, do not have clear norms and are more tolerant of deviation from the rules. Heterogeneous societies and countries in the midst of social and political transition, like Australia, Israel, the Netherlands and Ukraine, are loose cultures.

These are cultures in which ‘‘societal members tend to be more open to change, and this openness may become manifest in changing expectations and attitudes about the masculinity of leadership.’’

Here is where Clinton’s mystery comes in. Tight cultures are not necessarily sexist ones — witness the inclusion of Norway on the list. But extremist subcultures are certainly tight cultures, and they are built on historical assumptions of male dominance. The perspective of Toh and Leonardelli helps to explain why these rigid ideologies are so fixated on keeping women down.

But what about the places like Norway: tight cultures where women do extremely well? Toh and Leonardelli’s answer to that apparent paradox is that where there has been a top-down decision to support female leaders, tight cultures are very good at executing that directive. That is because these societies are effective at acting on the collective will. If the decision is made to elevate women, tight societies will implement it.

‘‘Although a culturally tight country, Norway ranks high in terms of gender egalitarianism,’’ the study’s authors point out. In Norway, egalitarianism is not a rebellion against prevailing cultural norms. It is, instead, what Norway’s new top-down consensus requires: ‘‘Norway has among the most ambitious equal opportunity legislation in the world that legally requires firms to reach a 40 percent women board representation by 2017.’’

The study’s framework also helps to explain one peculiarity of women in the workplace. Tight societies that choose egalitarianism, like Norway, have been good at pushing women into the corporate establishment. Loose societies that are open to change have been good at empowering women more broadly, encouraging them to join the workforce and to start their own small businesses.

But the one thing women around the world have failed to do is create paradigm-shifting companies. None of the great technology startups — for example, Google, Apple and Facebook — were founded by a woman. Nor were any of the leading hedge funds, the innovators in the world of money, established by a woman. Women are not just underrepresented in this space of transformative entrepreneurs — they are entirely absent.

At first blush, this gap seems to contradict the analysis by Toh and Leonardelli. After all, startups embody a profoundly loose culture. It does not matter whether you are a misfit or an ultraconformist, so long as you have a brilliant idea and are able to implement it.

But the authors point out that leadership is not just about how others view you — it is also about how you view yourself.

Centuries of sexism, they argue, mean that ‘‘even when possessing and demonstrating leadership behavior that is superior to others in the group, women leaders may sometimes prefer to cede the formal leadership role to men in the group because they, too, believe that being male or masculine is more leaderlike.’’

Loose cultures can counteract those self-imposed stereotypes to some degree. But the final frontier for women, even in societies that allow them to lead established institutions, is to be ruthless and to take big risks, essential qualities in world-changing entrepreneurs. Instead, as the authors found of female entrepreneurs in Malaysia, women often have to ‘‘lead as if they were mothers or teachers.’’

Forget Roman Catholics and contraception, evangelicals and Mormonism, Newt Gingrich’s three wives and even Mitt Romney’s dog. If you are struggling to understand a roller-coaster U.S. election season, described by one writer as “wackadoodle,” your Rosetta Stone should be a dry academic paper by the economist Emmanuel Saez.

In an age of celebrity scholars, Saez, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is a shy data jock who does most of his communicating by marshaling vast pools of statistics. But he has probably done more than any pundit or political spinmeister to shape the political narrative of our age — it is the number-crunching of Saez and his longtime collaborator, Thomas Piketty, that gave us the notion of the 1 percent and the evidence that they are pulling away from everyone else.

That’s why, in the community where economics and politics intersect, a new Saez paper is hot news. And his latest, which set Twitter abuzz this week, is a humdinger. Saez has come up with a killer fact: In the 2010 recovery, 93 percent of the gains were captured by the top 1 percent. That’s because top incomes grew 11.6 percent in 2010, while the incomes of the 99 percent increased only 0.2 percent.

That gain is particularly painful because it comes after an 11.6 percent drop in income for the 99 percent, Saez reports, the largest such fall over a two-year period since the Great Depression. That decline more than erases the income gains since the last downturn. We may not yet be a lost generation, but we have certainly experienced a lost decade.

This battering of the middle class — or really, everyone except the rich — is the powerful and painful economic reality that is driving the angry, polarized political debate in the United States. Saez is hardly a household name in the U.S. heartland, but the economic whiplash he describes is American everyday life. It is why voters are so angry, and why they are attracted by candidates who present themselves as outsiders offering a vision of change.

The healthy rebound of the 1 percent that Saez documents is also important because it runs counter to the rising narrative of an economic elite that is under siege. The recent decline in Wall Street bonuses and attacks on the titans of finance by both Occupy Wall Street and, less predictably, the Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, have provoked the angry retort that the people at the top have suffered from the financial crisis, too, and that their travails are no less worthy of sympathy.

But Saez shows that while the financial crisis hurt those at the top more than anyone else — the income of the 1 percent plummeted 36.3 percent between 2007 and 2009, compared with an overall average fall of 17.4 percent — their recovery has been spectacular, while everyone else has languished. Interestingly, the top 1 percent fared better in President Barack Obama’s recession than they did in the recession of President George W. Bush from 2000 to 2002.

Conventional wisdom has it that Americans are more tolerant of the ultrarich than people in many other countries, and that one reason for this benevolent attitude is that in the United States, those at the top earned their way there. Saez offers some support for this view.

“The evidence suggests that top income earners today are not ‘rentiers’ deriving their incomes from past wealth, but rather are ‘working rich,’ highly paid employees or new entrepreneurs who have not yet accumulated fortunes comparable to those accumulated during the Gilded Age,” Saez writes.

That’s a good thing, and it helps to explain why the same people who cheered Occupy Wall Street also treated the death of Steve Jobs like the passing of a secular saint.

But Saez cautions that a plutocracy of the working rich “might not last for very long,” pointing in particular to the cuts in the estate tax as a measure that could “accelerate the path toward the reconstitution of the great wealth concentration that existed in the U.S. economy before the Great Depression.”

In a footnote, Saez also directs readers to a 2007 paper he co-wrote that reveals another worrying characteristic of the 1 percent. Social mobility — the other great promise of U.S. capitalism — is weaker than Americans assume, and it’s getting worse. “At the same time as the gap in earnings between the upper-middle class and the top percentile was drastically widening, it was becoming less likely that an upper-middle class earner could reach the top percentile within 10 years,” he writes.

Saez’s new research is bad news for Mitt Romney, this political season’s most striking emblem of the 1 percent, and it provides a playbook for Obama’s re-election campaign. But the men who will take the most pleasure from it are former President Bill Clinton and his economic team, a group today much maligned for not foreseeing the financial crisis.

The Clintonites turn out to be the heroes of Saez’s economic history of the 1 percent. The economic expansion between 1993 and 2000 was a bonanza for the 1 percent, whose income grew 98.7 percent, a staggering increase that exceeded even the 61.8 percent gain for the 1 percent during the 2002 to 2007 Bush expansion. But the income of the 99 percent grew only 6.8 percent during the Bush go-go years, while it increased a solid 20.3 percent during the Clinton expansion.

As Saez dryly comments: “Those results may also help explain why the dramatic growth in top incomes during the Clinton administration did not generate much public outcry while there has been a great level of attention to top incomes in the press and in the public debate since 2005.” That is the ultimate irony — Clinton, a hated figure of the right, was actually the guy who made it safe for the 1 percent.

To understand the significance of the presidential election this weekend in Russia, read a book by two U.S.-based academics that is being published this month. Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, respectively, is a wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.

Their one-word answer, as Acemoglu summed it up for me, is ‘‘politics.’’ Acemoglu and Robinson divide the world into countries governed by ‘‘inclusive’’ institutions and those ruled by ‘‘extractive’’ ones. Inclusive societies, with England and its Glorious Revolution of 1688 in the vanguard, deliver sustainable growth and technological innovation. Extractive ones can have spurts of prosperity, but because they are ruled by a narrow elite guided by its own self-interest, their economic vigor eventually fades.

‘‘It is really about societies that have a more equitable distribution of political power versus those that don’t,’’ Acemoglu told me. ‘‘It is about societies where the elite, the rich, can do what they want and those where they cannot.’’

For many of us, that is a welcome conclusion. It may also seem to be an obvious one. But Acemoglu pointed out that academics, policymakers and business leaders have often advanced quite different views. One perspective is that all that matters is economic growth and the right technocratic mix of policies necessary to deliver it. This approach, implicit in the prescriptions of so many International Monetary Fund missions, is that if countries can get richer, everything else will fall into place.

A version of this view, which has gained particular currency since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is that the key is private property. Establish property rights, the reformers in Warsaw, Moscow and Beijing believed, and economic and social success will inevitably follow.

But Acemoglu and Robinson argue that if an extractive regime is in charge, neither wealth nor private property can save a country from eventual decline. The Russia of today, they believe, is a textbook extractive regime, and that is what makes the vote this weekend, and the unexpected protests that preceded it, so significant.

‘‘Russia is ruled by a narrow clique,’’ Acemoglu said. ‘‘The only thing that is keeping it going is a big boom in natural resources and a clever handling of the media.’’

The point, Acemoglu argues, is that wealth in and of itself doesn’t lead to sustained growth: ‘‘Saudi Arabia can get a lot of growth, but that is not the right growth. Take away the oil and Saudi Arabia would be like a poor African country.’’

A crucial argument Acemoglu and Robinson make — and one foreign aid donors and policy advisers too often miss — is that the leaders of extractive regimes don’t implement policies that stifle sustainable growth out of ignorance. They aren’t stupid; they are merely and rationally pursuing their own self-interest. The real ignorance is that of outsiders who fail to appreciate that in an extractive regime, the interests of the rulers and the ruled do not coincide.

‘‘When you think of somebody like Chávez, you will see that his objective is not to enrich Venezuela,’’ Acemoglu said, referring to President Hugo Chávez. ‘‘He is not letting markets work because his goal is something else.’’

Acemoglu and Robinson’s analytical framework helps to make sense of one of the seeming paradoxes of the past 12 months — the prosperous middle-class people who have taken to the streets in the Arab world, in India and in Russia to protest crony capitalism. If you believe that economic growth today is a sufficient condition for long-term prosperity, these affluent agitators are puzzling. That leads observers to search for softer grievances, like the quest for dignity.

But Acemoglu and Robinson believe that dignity and long-term prosperity are intimately connected. The protesters, who put the demand for political rights ahead of everything else, are right; the academic consensus that argues they should simply focus on the correct economic policies is wrong.

In the early Putin era, the Acemoglu and Robinson approach was very much a minority view. As recently as 2008, an essay in Foreign Affairs by another pair of influential Western scholars laid out the ‘‘conventional explanation for Vladimir Putin’s popularity’’ thus: ‘‘Since 2000, under Putin, order has returned, the economy has flourished, and the average Russian is living better than ever before. As political freedom has decreased, economic growth has increased. Putin may have rolled back democratic gains, the story goes, but these were necessary sacrifices on the altar of stability and growth.’’

But in their Foreign Affairs essay those scholars strongly disagreed: ‘‘This conventional narrative is wrong, based almost entirely on a spurious correlation between autocracy and growth. The emergence of Russian democracy in the 1990s did indeed coincide with state breakdown and economic decline, but it did not cause either. The reemergence of Russian autocracy under Putin, conversely, has coincided with economic growth but not caused it (high oil prices and recovery from the transition away from communism deserve most of the credit).’’

The essay’s authors concluded with a prediction about Russia’s future that fits neatly within the framework of extractive versus inclusive institutions and labels Putin’s Russia the former: ‘‘The Kremlin talks about creating the next China, but Russia’s path is more likely to be something like that of Angola — an oil-dependent state that is growing now because of high oil prices but has floundered in the past when oil prices were low and whose leaders seem more intent on maintaining themselves in office to control oil revenues and other rents than on providing public goods and services to a beleaguered population.’’

Acemoglu and Robinson are pretty tough on Western experts, officials and business people who, they believe, are too easily seduced by the leaders of extractive regimes, particularly ones enjoying temporary bursts of prosperity.

But the 2008 Foreign Affairs essay highlights a very important exception. One of the authors of that devastating critique of Putinism was Michael A. McFaul, the new U.S. ambassador to Moscow. That appointment, lauded by many inside and outside Russia for utilizing the skills of an acknowledged Russia expert, may be one reason to be hopeful about Russia today.