Sacramento is California's capital, but the city and its surrounding metropolitan area, roughly 2 million people, also make up an accurate microcosm of the state's dominant socioeconomic trends.

The Sacramento region has been growing steadily, its population growth reflects the statewide dominance of immigration in growth, and its development patterns - rapid expansion of "new economy" jobs and population in the suburban fringes, slower growth and rising cultural diversity in the urban core - also mirror what is happening in California as a whole. Sacramento, in fact, has been labeled as the most culturally diverse city in the nation - again reflecting the state's incredible social complexity.

The Sacramento area's political patterns have also tended to reflect those of the state - its urban core becoming more Democratic as its cultural demographics change and its suburbs becoming more Republican as their populations expand. Sacramento's urban-suburban split has generated the kinds of regional conflicts seen throughout California over issues such as low-income housing development, transportation priorities and sales tax-spawning retail development - the latter encapsulated in a brief but bitter clash in the Legislature over city-sponsored legislation that would have required Sacramento suburbs to share their burgeoning sales tax revenues.

If Sacramento, as it appears evident, does accurately reflect what's happening in the nation's most populous and complex state, its trends may foretell, with a high degree of accuracy, what will happen in California. And in that context, a newly published research paper on poverty in Sacramento County gains additional currency.

California State University, Sacramento, statistician Robert Mogull gathered data on poverty in Sacramento County - roughly half of the six-county Sacramento region - from the 2000 census, broken down by ethnicity, age and other factors and, using standard statistical techniques, projected forward to 2009 what's likely to change. The census found that 13.5 percent of Sacramento County residents were living below the official poverty line of $17,000 a year in 1999 for a family of four and, not surprisingly, the highest concentrations were found among nonwhite Sacramentans, as well as children and single mothers.

Mogull concluded, after massaging the data, that "the incidence of poverty will rise over the decade" from 13.5 percent to 16 percent. He projects that poverty will decline among those with high levels of poverty now, relatively speaking, and increase among whites, the elderly and American Indians, and with population growth the overall number of poor will grow rather sharply, from 170,000 to 216,000.

Mogull is completing a new research project on poverty in the state as a whole and says his findings for California are a mirror image of those for Sacramento County, confirming its microcosmic status.

There's little doubt that under the influence of powerful economic and social forces, California continues to evolve into a two-tier society. To say that the "rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer" would be an oversimplification, but over the last couple of decades, California has seen the emergence of more distinct socioeconomic classes, divided by education, home ownership, access to health care and other factors.

California, whose median home price now tops $400,000, has the nation's second-lowest level of home ownership (New York, where apartment living is ingrained, is a bit lower) and one of its lowest levels of health insurance coverage, to cite but two dividing points.

Much of this phenomenon is explained by the post-industrial economy, rooted in technology and services, which generates demands for both highly educated, highly compensated workers and low-skill, low-pay workers (many of them ill-educated immigrants), and needs ever-fewer blue-collar factory hands.

The socioeconomic stratification of California is likely to continue, and it will fuel unique and contentious political issues; one, in fact, will be on the ballot in November: Whether the state should require employers to provide health care coverage to workers.

Could California politics evolve into an arena for class conflict? We may be there already.