Unless
we take the future into our hands, our country may travel yet farther down
the road of social division. Despite the wave of political
advertising that will greet the new millennium, the real world of the
twenty-first century will harden into a brittle three-class structure:
•a lower class condemned
to dead-end jobs and frequent unemployment,
•an upper class of
professionals enjoying fabulous prosperity,
•and a vast middle class
increasingly embittered by continuing economic stagnation.
As
the ideal of equal opportunity recedes . . . How long will democracy itself
survive under such grim circumstances?
Bruce Ackerman and
Anne Alstott, The Stakeholder Society
Stakeholder