Ancient Greece's middle-out strategy.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

There's not much doubt that the central issue of the 2016 elections will be wage stagnation and the shrinking middle class. Liberals have been itching for this fight for years, of course. But even conservatives are sounding like economic populists these days--Republicans "are and should be the party of the 47 percent," declared Senator Ted Cruz in late April.

That both parties are focused on addressing the same big Kahuna of economic problems is certainly a good thing. We desperately need a contest of ideas, even if some of the solutions being offered, especially on the GOP side, seem absurdly ill-matched to the problem. (A flat tax? Really?)

But in the back of many people's minds, certainly mine, is the fear that maybe there aren't solutions to this problem. Maybe the great American middle class is just not coming back. We are now six years into an economic recovery that has seen next to zero wage growth. As Monica Potts shows in this issue's cover story ("The Post-Ownership Society," page 44), even highly educated Millennials in booming Washington, D.C., are having a hard time seeing a path to middle-class financial stability. Millennials generally are also finding it difficult to start businesses, despite their eagerness to do so (see "The Lost Entrepreneurial Generation?" by Matt Connolly, page 60), or to buy homes, with some exceptions (see "The Young and the Rentless" by Jordan Fraade, page 62). The mass downward mobility Millennials are experiencing is not a new phenomenon, either. As Phillip Longman documents ("Wealth and Generations," page 51), every generation born after 1953 has done less well than the one that preceded it.

Looking back at that record, and looking forward, to an economy where globalization and computer algorithms continue to eat away at middle-class jobs while Thomas Piketty's famous equation "r > g" (returns on capital exceed economic growth) continues to favor the rich, it's hard to be optimistic. Sure, generational upward mobility was a defining reality for most of American history. But all good things come to an end, right? Perhaps two centuries of egalitarian prosperity is about all a democracy can sustain.

If that dark vision haunts you, as it does me, then a new book, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, by the Stanford classicist Josiah Ober, is worth taking note of. Most of us know, or learned in school, about the astonishing cultural and political contributions of ancient Greece, from the development of democracy to...