The crisis roiling Wall Street has led to calls for a new type of capitalism, presenting a real opportunity for positive and productive changes. What would market capitalism 2.0 look like? To start, it would pay more attention to fairness. It would also guarantee that full-time workers don't live in poverty. Finally, it would offer an enhanced safety net.

The benefits of the vast growth in the US economy over the last few decades have accrued to the wealthy. The drivers of that growth have not only been executives but also the American workforce, which has been more productive than ever. Nearly two years ago, Federal Reserve Board Chair Ben Bernanke noted that income inequality could threaten the nation's "dynamism," and recently at a conference on global capitalism at the Harvard Business School, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers called for action. Summers suggested that in order to sustain economic growth, we must have shared prosperity. He offered startling statistics: The top 1 percent of earners in the United States gained $600 billion annually in income while the bottom 80 percent lost that same $600 billion from 1979 to 2008. That translates into an average gain of $500,000 in annual income for each person at the top, while those at the bottom lost an average of $8,000.

It is not a surprise that the ranks of the working poor are swelling. At the same time that real wages have been decreasing for a significant proportion of American workers, costs have been rising, leaving many families without enough money to cover their basic human needs such as food, fuel, healthcare, and housing. Today, one in four working families in the United States is considered low-income.

Poverty and widening inequality are morally, economically, and politically unsustainable. Recent estimates find that poverty costs the US economy $500 billion annually or 4 percent of GDP due to loss of productivity and economic growth, increased crime, and rising health expenditures.

A new social contract is needed, guaranteeing that anyone who works full time will not be poor. We need to "make work pay." A couple of ways to do this quickly include expanding the earned income tax credit, which provides a tax refund to low-income wage earners, and assisting working families to access affordable child care. These policies would represent an investment in the workforce and in productivity.