How skewed is America's income inequality? Take our quiz.

Income inequality has become a central issue in the presidential election, with President Obama declaring it “the defining issue of our time,” Mitt Romney decrying “the bitter politics of envy,” and Romney’s former Bain partner (and current campaign contributor) Edward Conard arguing, in a new book, that income inequality is something America needs more of.  To evaluate what the candidates say in the coming months, you’ll need a working knowledge of the topic. How well do you know American inequality? Take this quiz based on my new book, "The Great Divergence":

2. If you had brought together in 2006 all the US-based production workers for Apple's hugely successful iPod, you could have:

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP/File
In this 2004 file photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs displays the iPod mini at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

Filled a football stadium

Sold out a drive-in movie

Fed them with a single pot of chili

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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