Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich explains why the remarkable success of a company like WhatsApp, which was recently purchased by Facebook for $19 billion, is symptomatic of the larger problem of income inequality that has plagued the US economy for a generation.

In the new economy there’s no connection between the size of a company’s customer base and the number of employees required to service them, he explains. Which is why just 55 employees could handle WhatsApp’s more than 450 million customers. Meanwhile, across the board, as productivity and profits continue to grow, workers and wages are increasingly being squeezed onto the margins.

How will we solve this challenge of spreading the gains of the information economy more broadly – this may be the most difficult economic question the nation will face in the coming decades.

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