<p>Politicians no longer change the world, technology does. Even as wealth has become more concentrated, power has become more dispersed.</p><p>In a wired world, it costs virtually nothing to reproduce a photo. Photo: Getty</p><p>Anyone who has ever looked a graph of income distribution for the UK or the US over the last five decades can't help but be struck by the same thing. Somewhere around 1979 or 1980, a long decline in the share of income going to the richest members of those societies halted, reversed, and has been climbing ever since. In the last decade this trend has been exacerbated. Middle-class wages have stagnated and started to fall.</p><p>So what happened at the end of the 1970s? We barely have to ask. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the two titans of neo-liberal economics, came to power, cut taxes and regulation, creating more dynamic but more unequal economies, the fundamentals of which remain intact today.</p><p><a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/01/kodak-vs-instagram-why-its-only-going-get-harder-make-good-living">Keep reading...</a></p>