Every economic crisis brings in its wake a wholesale reordering of society. The Great Recession of 2008, no matter how mild in comparison to past upheavals, has altered the world in ways unanticipated just a decade ago.

Your new book, The Age of Acquiescence (Little, Brown and Company, 2015), describes two major periods of wealth acquisition in the United States—the Gilded Age of the late 1800s and the current “Age of Acquiescence.”

Marx once wrote that “it is essential to educate the educator.” Of late, educators have done quite well all on their own.