Who are the 1% in the U.S.? Writer Jonathan Rothwell makes a very strong argument that they are mostly doctors, lawyers, finance professionals and similar independent professionals And that big corporations are not the problem, either.

By Richard Florida @ City Lab, Dec. 19

In this interview with Jonathan Rothwell about his new book, A Republic of Equals, he explains how U.S. racism helped create elite, highly paid professions.

Inequality and low productivity growth are two of the biggest problems that vex the U.S. economy. For Jonathan Rothwell, they are of a piece, driven by the power of large and influential groups of professionals in fields like finance, medicine, and law to wall themselves off from competition.

Rothwell, formerly of Brookings Institution and now Gallup’s senior economist, shows that the United States is unique among the advanced nations in the power afforded to these groups. The huge differences in incomes we see in this country are not the result of education or skills, but of political power. Inequality in the United States is also bound up with race and racism, from slavery, to the exclusion of minorities from early professional organizations, to exclusionary zoning that denies minority and low-income people access to suburban schools. [....]

Surprisingly, only a small percentage of top earners work in the tech sector or in fields like computer programming. There is some evidence that the adoption of information-technology has disproportionately benefitted workers with higher levels of education. But that does not explain why there are so many doctors and lawyers in the top 1 percent [....]