A view of Seattle's one 1 percent.
A view of Seattle's 1 percent. Charles Mudede

A post by the Brookings Institution makes the important and easily overlooked point that one of the leading social problems of our day, the problem of inequality—and a problem that was launched into the mainstream by, of all things, the spectacular success of a very thick book by a young French economist, Thomas Piketty—is most acute in big cities.

We like to imagine our cities as centers of progressive politics; we are always proud to see ourselves, urban consumers, as the image of cosmopolitanism. But once again, our political self-perfection does not match with reality. Seattle might have a gay mayor, certainly something that would never happen in, say, Blackfoot, Idaho (the "Potato Capital of the World"), but the chances are the folks in Blackfoot live in a more equitable society than the progressive inhabitants of Seattle, which, by the way, topped the list of cities that "witnessed dramatic growth in the incomes of their highest-earning households between 2012 and 2013."

With its second-rate public transportation system, its so-so planning, and its increasing lack of racial diversity, we can step back and make the assessment that, when compared with other cities and other urban values, Seattle is truly (and only) excelling in making rich people richer and life more and more expensive for everyone else. The boom we are going through is about little else.