A recent Census Bureau report stated that there's been a 50% increase in the working poor -- that is, people who have jobs but are still below the poverty level.

That's part of the Third-Worldization of the society. It's not just unemployment, but also wage reduction. Real wages have been declining since the late 1960s. Since 1987, they've even been declining for college-educated people, which was a striking shift.

There's supposed to be a recovery going on, and it's true that a kind of recovery is going on. It's at about half the rate of preceding postwar recoveries from recession (there've been half a dozen of them) and the rate of job creation is less than a third. Furthermore -- out of line with earlier recoveries -- the jobs themselves are low-paying, and a huge number of them are temporary.

This is what's called "increasing flexibility of the labor market." Flexibility is a word like reform -- it's supposed to be a good thing. Actually, flexibility means insecurity. It means you go to bed at night and don't know if you'll have a job in the morning. Any economist can explain that that's a good thing for the economy -- that is, for profit-making, not for the way people live.

Low wages also increase job insecurity. They keep inflation low, which is good for people who have money -- bondholders, say. Corporate profits are zooming, but for most of the population, things are grim. And grim circumstances, without much prospect for a future or for constructive social action, express themselves in violence.

It's interesting that you should say that. Most of the examples of mass murders are in the workplace. I'm thinking of the various killings in post offices and fast-food restaurants, where workers are disgruntled for one reason or another, or have been fired or laid off.

Not only have real wages stagnated or declined, but working conditions have gotten much worse. You can see that just in counting hours of work. Julie Schor, an economist at Harvard, brought out an important book on this a couple of years ago, called The Overworked American. If I remember her figures correctly, by around 1990, the time she was writing, workers had to put in about six weeks extra work a year to maintain something like a 1970 real wage level.

Along with the increasing hours of work comes increasing harshness of work conditions, increasing insecurity and, because of the decline of unions, reduced ability to protect oneself. In the Reagan years, even the minimal government programs for protecting workers against workplace accidents and the like were reduced, in the interest of maximizing profits. The absence of constructive options, like union organizing, leads to violence.