LA's Shrinking Middle Class

"Forget about LA's middle class. It's dead and buried... Los Angeles has boiled down to an economy of the well-off and the far-from-well-off... And here's the weird, almost perverse part: it seems to be working." That's from an article in this month's Los Angeles magazine. It's well known that LA is becoming a two-tiered society, composed of the pretty rich and the very poor, with fewer and fewer people in between. Yet, contrary to ominous predictions, the economy is thriving--despite a shrinking middle class. We get two views on how long that will last.