Getting straight to the point, Chicago has an elephant in its parlor and it is a bigger one than at most other top universities. Chicago and its law school distribute to alumni and others fine quarterlies with many glossy and other prints mixed in with articles about how Chicago is at the cutting edge of attacking the world's problems and has multiple outreach programs doing wonderful things in every direction. But the elephant I address here squats unceremoniously in Chicago's parlor. I explain.

The elephant's description in a nut shell runs like this: only 47 percent of working age Americans have full time jobs. 41.3 percent of that labor force has been classified more broadly as unemployed. Labors' share of national income has dropped from 66 percent in 1982 to 58 percent now. Our middle class is disappearing, as its real mean income drops sharply. Millennials, loaded with debt from second rate and on line colleges, sleep without jobs on their parents' couches. The income and wealth distributions in America have been and are skewing badly and rapidly. After much off-shoring of America's productive capability, robotics is coming at us like a freight train and those machines are designed to displace most mid-level and many high level jobs, including many in the already squeezed service sector -- all to further clobber Labor's share, increase Capital's and worsen the skews. A Marxian surplus of labor obtains to depress wages and Labor's share, and Capital's interest based share increases rapidly. With inheritance taxes and top effective income tax rates in the toilet, multiple dynasties of quadrillionairs loom, as Bill Gates has hinted. That is the elephant in the parlor noted briefly.

It comprises a basic taboo set of topics at Chicago when these topics should be at the top of the list for serious research and discussion, especially for the social science departments which instead much more apologize for and rationalize the dynamics of the status quo.

For example, Claudia Golden, a classmate, a Chicago PhD, and now a named professor of economics at Harvard, featured here in a recent article, would have us believe the income skew is due to many losing the race between education and technology. I don't believe it for a heartbeat. To be sure, IQ and educational differentials matter, but not nearly enough, within the structure of things, to explain what we see going on. Thomas Piketty, in "Capital in the 21st Century," explains much more, more cogently.

We have mega problems, I mean a really big elephant in the parlor. Why did Piketty's book have to be written by a professor at the University of Paris and not in America? No bit of happenstance, I suggest. And look at the reactionary ruckus it caused. Why he even said the no-no words, "income distribution" and "wealth distribution" and he offered an explanation for why Labor's share has been shrinking and Capital's growing and suggested both will continue. Heresy, for sure, not to speak of his wealth redistributive remedies. A major uproar; how dare the outsider. His data and analysis are clearly all wrong, was the pundits' saw.

But there are major economic implications here, too. The fact is the rich and wealthy have more than they can spend to the point they hoard and off-shore much income, relatively reducing consumption and investment in American and seriously braking the US economy. For now, they depend significantly on emerging middle class consumers in other countries and global capitalism to close the consumption gap and maintain production and profits. But there are big limits ahead if trends continue.

What we observe is a bought off arch apologist's position in the Academy, especially at Chicago where, for example, Chicago's Nobel Laureate economics professor Robert Lucas, Jr. has argued, based on his models, that all unemployment is voluntary, simply people taking a self-willed vacation. Republican reactionaries of course picked up on that as authority for their "lazy good-for-nothing bums" theory of unemployment . No matter that American jobs were off shored in droves.. But, like turtles, at Chicago, it is apologetics all the way down.

I was at MIT hiring an economics professor as an expert witness in a large antitrust case in 1978, at the time of the big snow blizzard. I asked him why MIT's economics department did not have at least a few Marxists economists on its faculty, like the top European econ departments. He quickly replied, no top econ department in the US could do that because university donors and corporate research sponsors would not tolerate it for a minute. When I arrived at his office, after much difficulty navigating the snow from nearby lodgings, I was shocked to find about 10 econ faculty members in their offices. I asked how and why. The answer was rented helicopters and to have minimal staffing so as to avoid losing a couple of hundred thousand dollars in corporate and other research funding for that day. And that was in 1978.

This story comports with another reason for the skews and the elephant in Chicago's parlor. It was well explained by Harvard's renegade law professor, Lawrence Lessig, who presented, in October and November of this year, the Berlin series of lectures at Chicago on "America: Compromised -- Studies in Institutional Corruption," with the paradigmatic case being Congress, then Finance, the Media and, lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the Academy. Lawrence walked into the lion's den to open the debate which basically went nowhere. The bottom line he presents is these institutions have been bought off, corrupted if you will by the money of the oligarchs who control too much in the economy.

These corrupted institutions, especially government which enacts laws and dispenses favors, work hard 1) to skew and protect the skewing of the income and wealth distributions, 2) protect Capital's growing share of national income and 3) to protect the corrupt systems involved. This is a big part of Chicago's elephant in the parlor, but aside from renegades like Lawrence or untouchables like Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia, there is nary a useful peep out of Chicago or too much of the rest of the Academy on point.

Chicago especially needs, if not a renaissance, at least an honest, house cleaning reformation, I am sad to say.