Why people can’t build wealth on wages alone, and what to do about it

As Jennifer Harris, director of the Economy and Society Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has recently pointed out, we are at a particularly fraught moment. Rising inequality means that fewer people have spending power, creating incentives that sharpen the affordability crisis for everybody else. But there are remedies that don’t require draconian taxes and are proven to work—at their core is ownership.  Since 1984, worker productivity in the United States has risen by 8...