What the public doesn’t know Many readers may have first come across Elizabeth Warren (as I did) in an online lecture: “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class: Higher Risks, Lower Rewards, and a Shrinking Safety Net.” The then-Harvard Law professor lectured in the glow of her 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.” Warren described how since the Reagan administration the rich got richer and the rest got screwed. (She put it more delicately.) The America Prospect this morning argues that Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis should in the public interest publish data it surely has that would make Warren’s case without her (or you) having to do the research. “Last year, America’s current-dollar GDP grew 6.6 percent to over $26,000,000,000—one quarter of the entire world’s total output, produced by just 6 percent of the world’s population,” explains Richard Parker. Yes, but who benefited? And so when the latest GDP number is announced, it’s front-page news in newspapers and magazines everywhere, a leading story for TV and radio, and the preoccupation of an almost uncountable number of online sites. But you may have noticed something strange about GDP: Because it’s a measure of the total economy’s output, it’s silent about how that output is divided among Americans. We’ve been living—and are living right now—in a nation with ever-increasing inequality, which makes the question of who gets how much of the GDP as important as GDP itself. And that makes it time for the…