Temin’s latest book shares a proclivity for big ideas with recent blockbuster economic tomes like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2017) or Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, 2017). But it is vastly shorter and (blessedly) lighter to carry than Piketty’s or Gordon’s.

Following a brief introduction, The Vanishing Middle Class divides into three sections of four chapters each, a fourth section with two chapters, and a tidy appendix contrasting Temin and Piketty on inequality models. All chapters are bite-sized, the arguments illuminated by simple figures or telling anecdotes drawn from today’s headlines.

The first section (“An American Dual Economy”) sets forth Temin’s organizing principle. The original dual-economy model posits a traditional, rural sector with a highly elastic labor supply and a modern, urban one that draws workers from the rural sector. Wages are higher in the urban sector because of migration...

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