The third-world threat I’m referring to is our own as we slowly become a nation with unequal education, unequal job prospects and unequal wealth. Recently in the NY Times, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration and now a Berkeley professor, wrote that the amount of money going to the top 1% has more than doubled since 1970:

The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

Increasingly we’re becoming a society divided by money, education and ideology. Find out more and what we might do to turn back towards being a first-world nation by following this link.