summary
Find this under READINGS “FOR EC1. Before you begin reading, if you don’t know what the words mean, you should look them up in a dictionary app: “ossified,” “oligarch,” “capital gains,” “chimera,” “conflagration,” “kindling,” and “pragmatism.” Write them down if it will help you remember.
Keep in mind that this was written in 2016. So when he talks about demonstrations in the streets near the end, he is talking about the “arab spring” demonstrations in the Middle East. You may need to look that up to get a little background to help with understanding. Consider the end of this article. He says that the 1% learn, but too late. What do you think he’s hinting at in that statement?
Summary format is the same. Start with the title, author, publication, and date. Then tell what you think the main idea of the article is. Then go on to explain. As usual, you should have at least two direct quotes in this summary. Explain the quotes. Put them in quotation marks so readers can tell the difference between what the author is saying and what you are saying. This is important. Pay attention to grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Don’t copy the entire thing word for word. Break it down and just keep the good stuff. Trust your judgment about what that is. Inequality Is a Serious Social Problem Income Inequality, 2016 From Opposing Viewpoints in Context, summary of 300-400
Economic Inequality has Accelerated
Title, Author, Publication, Date. (Note the dates of these articles. Important for when you make your argument later). You can just Google these terms for clarification: “caste system,” “gilded age,” “Horatio Alger.” When he talks about a “leftist rag” in the beginning and refers to “Business Week,” he is using heavy irony (look up irony if you don’t know) because Business Week is absolutely not leftist or liberal. It is a conservative rightist magazine, the opposite of a leftist rag. He also refers to their writers as “commies,” short for communists, again heavily ironic.
Start off with the main idea. Again , you will need at least two direct quotes from the article. Quotation marks around the direct quotes so readers know the difference between what you say and what the author says. It will also keep you from getting confused when you go back to this material to assemble your essay.
Growing Inequality Is a Serious Social Problem
Income Inequality, 2016
From Opposing Viewpoints in Context
“America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way.”
In the following viewpoint, Joseph E. Stiglitz argues that wealth in America has become too
concentrated in the top 1 percent. He contends that the growth in wealth of the rich, along with
a decrease in wealth of the middle class, has caused severe inequality that has several
negative effects. Stiglitz claims that the rich have influenced policy in such a way that the
inequality is now self-perpetuating and threatens to result in social unrest. Stiglitz is an
economist, a professor at Columbia University, and the author of The Price of Inequality: How
Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future.
As you read, consider the following questions:
Stiglitz claims that the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise by what percentage over1.
the past decade?
What does the author say is the most obvious example of a policy created by the top 12.
percent for the top 1 percent?
What fraction of Americans are on food stamps, according to the author?3.
It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1
percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of
wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved
considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One
response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people and
to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent
have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen
their incomes fall. For men with only high school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12
percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to
those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified
Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia
with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil,
have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce
gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th
century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The
justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory
associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory
that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The
corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution
to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large
bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance
bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing
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being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our
society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the information age, have
received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our
global economy to the brink of ruin.
The Problems with Inequality
Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that
person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That
argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after
year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several
reasons for this.
First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish
equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our
people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to
inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special
interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new
distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most
talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields
that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.
Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective action“—it needs
government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world
have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in
public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an underinvestment in infrastructure
(look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and
in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead.
None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth
distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more
reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on
government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things
for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever
empathy they may once have had. They also worry about strong government—one that could use its
powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good. The top 1
percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just
fine: too gridlocked to redistribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes.
The Power of the Top 1 Percent
Economists are not sure how to fully explain the growing inequality in America. The ordinary dynamics
of supply and demand have certainly played a role: laborsaving technologies have reduced the
demand for many “good” middle-class, blue-collar jobs. Globalization has created a worldwide
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marketplace, pitting expensive unskilled workers in America against cheap unskilled workers
overseas. Social changes have also played a role—for instance, the decline of unions, which once
represented a third of American workers and now represent about 12 percent.
But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way.
The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the
rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride.
Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D.
Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of antitrust
laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of
today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that
have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The
government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous
bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of
transparency and to conflicts of interest.
When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it’s
tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way
behind the pack, but now we’re doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be
building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing.
Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the
1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles
Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a
few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme
Court, in its recent Citizens United [v. Federal Election Commission] case, has enshrined the right of
corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the
political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in
the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the
top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1
percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policy makers on trade and
economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-
dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining
over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill
cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of
the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.
The Costs Imposed on Society
America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-
documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means.
Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality
massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that
the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes
only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war:
borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national
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interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of
balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake;
corporations and contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are likewise
designed to benefit the rich: They encourage competition among countries for business, which drives
down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what
used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine
what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among
countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on
ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the
top 1 percent don’t need to care.
Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent,
perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of
opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair
society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise:
The chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are
smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an
unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising
food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth
unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-
demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to
get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from
“food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted
“trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of
creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent,
comparable to the unemployment rate.
In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political,
economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been
toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families
elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next?
They are right to worry. These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1
percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where
entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand
actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.
The Future of America
As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it
come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled
places.
Alexis de Tocqueville [a French political thinker] once described what he saw as a chief part of the
peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last
two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for
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me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying
attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a
precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything
noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of
American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: Looking out for the other guy
isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.
The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles,
but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is
bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1
percent eventually do learn. Too late.
Further Readings
Books
Orazio P. Attanasio, Erich Battistin, and Mario Padula Inequality in Living Standards Since 1980:
Income Tells Only a Small Part of the Story. Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2010.
Francine D. Blau Gender, Inequality, and Wages. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Jim Clifton The Coming Jobs War: What Every Leader Must Know About the Future of Job
Creation. New York: Gallup Press, 2011.
Chuck Collins 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality Is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About
It. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012.
Uri Dadush, Kemal Dervis, Sarah Puritz Milsom, and Bennett Stancil Inequality in America: Facts,
Trends, and International Perspectives. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012.
Peter Edelman So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America. New York: New
Press, 2012.
Steve Fraser The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized
Wealth and Power. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.
Howard Steven Friedman The Measure of a Nation: How to Regain America’s Competitive Edge
and Boost Our Global Standing. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth Women’s Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of
Women in America. Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2012.
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich
Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.
David Cay Johnston, ed. Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality. New York: New Press,
2014.
Lilly Ledbetter and Lanier Scott Isom Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at
Goodyear and Beyond. New York: Crown Archetype, 2012.
Leslie McCall The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs About Inequality, Opportunity, and
Redistribution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Branko Milanovic The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global
Inequality. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Brian Miller and Mike Lapham The Self-Made Myth: And the Truth About How Government Helps
Individuals and Businesses Succeed. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012.
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Timothy Noah The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do
About It. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012.
June O’Neill and Dave O’Neill The Declining Importance of Race and Gender in the Labor Market:
The Role of Employment Discrimination Policies. Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2012.
Robert D. Putnam Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.
Robert B. Reich Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. New York: Vintage Books,
2011.
Robert B. Reich Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy,
and How to Fix It. New York: Vintage Books, 2012.
Tavis Smiley and Cornel West The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto. New York:
Smiley Books, 2012.
Joseph E. Stiglitz The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2012.
Matt Taibbi The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. New York: Spiegel &
Grau Trade Paperbacks, 2014.
Elizabeth Warren A Fighting Chance. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies
Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
Periodicals
Jared Bernstein “The Impact of Inequality on Growth,” Center for American Progress, December
2013.
Donald J. Boudreaux and Mark J. Perry “Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry: The Myth of a
Stagnant Middle Class,” Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2013.
Thomas L. Hungerford “In Defense of the 99 Percent: Rising US Income Inequality—Causes,
Consequences, and Solutions,” Dialogue, Autumn 2013.
Stewart Lansley “The Hourglass Society,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 28, 2013.
Aparna Mathur “A Cell Phone in Every Pot,” National Review, October 9, 2013.
Elizabeth McNichol, Douglas Hall, David Cooper, and Vincent Palacios “Pulling Apart: A State-by-
State Analysis of Income Trends,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Economic Policy
Institute, November 15, 2012.
Ryan Messmore “Justice, Inequality, and the Poor,” National Affairs, no. 10, Winter 2012.
Pew Research Center “The Lost Decade of the Middle Class: Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier,” August
22, 2012.
Jonathan Rauch “Inequality and Its Perils,” National Journal, September 27, 2012.
Michael Tanner “The Income-Inequality Myth,” National Review, January 10, 2012.
Jordan Weissmann “US Income Inequality: It’s Worse Today than It Was in 1774,” Atlantic,
September 19, 2012.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2016 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning.
Source Citation
Stiglitz, Joseph E. “Growing Inequality Is a Serious Social Problem.” Income
Inequality, edited by Noël Merino, Greenhaven Press, 2016. Opposing Viewpoints.
Opposing Viewpoints in Context, draweb.njcu.edu:2048/login?url=http://link.galegr
oup.com/apps/doc/EJ3010979207/OV
IC?u=newjerseycu&xid=4d32eee1. Accessed 7 Sept. 2017. Originally published
as “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1 %,” Vanity Fair, vol. 53, no. 5, May 2011.
Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ3010979207
draweb.njcu.edu:2048/login?url=http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EJ3010979207/OVIC?u=newjerseycu&xid=4d32eee1
draweb.njcu.edu:2048/login?url=http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EJ3010979207/OVIC?u=newjerseycu&xid=4d32eee1
draweb.njcu.edu:2048/login?url=http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EJ3010979207/OVIC?u=newjerseycu&xid=4d32eee1
Economic Inequality Has Accelerated
Is the Gap Between the Rich and Poor Growing ?, 2006
Economic Inequality Has Accelerated
Paul Krugman is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University and has been a columnist for the New York Times since 1999.
America is a society of haves and have-nots. Income inequality continues to grow, upward mobility has declined, and American society has taken on the rigid characteristics of a caste system. The American dream of achieving more than the previous generation has all but disappeared. Thirty years ago America was a relatively middle-class society, but it has since entered a new Gilded Age in which the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer.
The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.
The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled “Waking Up From the American Dream.” The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society.
And guess what? Our political leaders are doing everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains—or even points out what is happening—as a practitioner of “class warfare.”
Let’s talk first about the facts on income distribution. Thirty years ago we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus: Gilded Age America was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way through the 1920s. During the 1930s and ’40s, however, America experienced what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have dubbed the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a result of New Deal [Depression relief programs] policies. And the new economic order persisted for more than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate profits and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate management—all helped to keep income gaps relatively small. The economy was hardly egalitarian, but a generation ago the gross inequalities of the 1920s seemed very distant.
A New Gilded Age
Now they’re back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez—confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office—between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they’re not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.
Never mind, say the apologists, who churn out papers with titles like that of a 2001 Heritage Foundation [a conservative think tank] piece, “Income Mobility and the Fallacy of Class-Warfare Arguments.” America, they say, isn’t a caste society—people with high incomes this year may have low incomes next year and vice versa, and the route to wealth is open to all. That’s where those commies at Business Week come in: As they point out (and as economists and sociologists have been pointing out for some time), America actually is more of a caste society than we like to think. And the caste lines have lately become a lot more rigid.
The myth of income mobility has always exceeded the reality: As a general rule, once they’ve reached their 30s, people don’t move up and down the income ladder very much. Conservatives often cite studies like a 1992 report by Glenn Hubbard, a Treasury official under the elder Bush [George H.W. Bush] who later became chief economic adviser to the younger Bush [George W.], that purport to show large numbers of Americans moving from low-wage to high-wage jobs during their working lives. But what these studies measure, as the economist Kevin Murphy put it, is mainly “the guy who works in the college bookstore and has a real job by his early 30s.” Serious studies that exclude this sort of pseudo-mobility show that inequality in average incomes over long periods isn’t much smaller than inequality in annual incomes.
It is true, however, that America was once a place of substantial intergenerational mobility: Sons often did much better than their fathers. A classic 1978 survey found that among adult men whose fathers were in the bottom 25 percent of the population as ranked by social and economic status, 23 percent had made it into the top 25 percent. In other words, during the first thirty years or so after World War II, the American dream of upward mobility was a real experience for many people.
Caste Society
Now for the shocker: The Business Week piece cites a new survey of today’s adult men, which finds that this number has dropped to only 10 percent. That is, over the past generation upward mobility has fallen drastically. Very few children of the lower class are making their way to even moderate affluence. This goes along with other studies indicating that rags-to-riches stories have become vanishingly rare, and that the correlation between fathers’ and sons’ incomes has risen in recent decades. In modern America, it seems, you’re quite likely to stay in the social and economic class into which you were born.
Business Week attributes this to the “Wal-Martization” of the economy, the proliferation of dead-end, low-wage jobs and the disappearance of jobs that provide entry to the middle class. That’s surely part of the explanation. But public policy plays a role—and will, if present trends continue, play an even bigger role in the future.
Put it this way: Suppose that you actually liked a caste society, and you were seeking ways to use your control of the government to further entrench the advantages of the haves against the have-nots. What would you do?
One thing you would definitely do is get rid of the estate tax, so that large fortunes can be passed on to the next generation. More broadly, you would seek to reduce tax rates both on corporate profits and on unearned income such as dividends and capital gains, so that those with large accumulated or inherited wealth could more easily accumulate even more. You’d also try to create tax shelters mainly useful for the rich. And more broadly still, you’d try to reduce tax rates on people with high incomes, shifting the burden to the payroll tax and other revenue sources that bear most heavily on people with lower incomes.
Meanwhile, on the spending side, you’d cut back on healthcare for the poor, on the quality of public education and on state aid for higher education. This would make it more difficult for people with low incomes to climb out of their difficulties and acquire the education essential to upward mobility in the modern economy.
And just to close off as many routes to upward mobility as possible, you’d do everything possible to break the power of unions, and you’d privatize government functions so that well-paid civil servants could be replaced with poorly paid private employees.
It all sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it?
Where is this taking us? Thomas Piketty [professor of economics in Paris, France] whose work with Saez [professor of economics, University of California-Berkeley] has transformed our understanding of income distribution, warns that current policies will eventually create “a class of rentiers in the U.S., whereby a small group of wealthy but untalented children controls vast segments of the US economy and penniless, talented children simply can’t compete.” If he’s right—and I fear that he is—we will end up suffering not only from injustice, but from a vast waste of human potential.
Goodbye, Horatio Alger.1 And goodbye, American Dream.
Footnotes
1. 1. Horatio Alger (1832–1899) was an American author who wrote boys’ adventure series. His young heroes triumph over adversity through a combination of sheer will, luck, and tenacity as they advance in their chosen careers.
Further Readings
Books
1. James Auerbachand and Richard S. Belous, eds. The Inequality Paradox: The Growth of Income Disparity. Washington, DC: National Policy Association, 1998.
1. Joel Blau Illusions of Prosperity: Working Families in an Age of Economic Insecurity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999.
1. Dennis Duane Braun The Rich Get Richer: The Rise of Income Inequality in the United States and the World. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1997.
1. Steve Brouwer Sharing the Pie: A Citizen’s Guide to Wealth and Power in America. New York: Henry Holt/Owl, 1998.
1. Grace Chang Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000.
1. Chuck Collins Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing American Wealth Gap. Boston: United for a Fair Economy, 1999.
1. Richard Douthwaite The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many, and Endangered the Planet. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society, 1999.
1. Ronald Dworkin Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
1. Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001.
1. Robert Frank The Winner Take All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More than the Rest of Us. New York: Penguin USA, 1996.
1. Philip Green Equality & Democracy. New York: New Press, 1998.
1. Jody Heymann The Widening Gap: Why America’s Working Families Are in Jeopardy and What Can Be Done About It. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
1. Lisa Keister Wealth in America: Trends in Wealth Inequality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
1. Ray F. Marshall Back to Shared Prosperity: The Growing Inequality of Wealth and Income in America. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1999.
1. Benjamin Page What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
1. Edward N. Wolff Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It. New York: New Press, 1999.
Periodicals
1. Robert J. Bresler “The Dilemma of Income Inequality,” USA Today Magazine, May 2000.
1. David Callahan “Take Back Values,” Nation, February 2004.
1. Douglas Clement “Beyond ‘Rich’ and ‘Poor,'” Region, June 2003.
1. CQ Researcher “At Issue: Are There Two Americas?” April 2005.
1. Sheldon Danziger “Comment on ‘The Age of Extremes: Concentrated Affluence and Poverty in the Twenty-first Century,'” Demography, November 1996.
1. Economist “Ever Higher Society, Ever Harder to Ascend,” January 2005.
1. David Futrelle, Jon Birger, and Pat Regnier “Getting Rich in America: Who Says the American Dream Is Dead?” Money, May 1, 2005.
1. Ted Halstead “The American Paradox,” Atlantic Monthly, January 2003.
1. Kevin A. Hassett “Rich Man, Poor Man: How to Think About Income Inequality (Hint: It’s Not as Bad as You May Think),” National Review, June 16, 2003.
1. Nigel Holloway “In Praise of Inequality,” Forbes, March 2003.
1. Paul Krugman “The Death of Horatio Alger: Our Political Leaders Are Doing Everything They Can to Fortify Class Inequality,” Nation, January 5, 2004.
1. Stephen Moore “Careful Whom You Soak,” National Review, November 24, 2003.
1. Cait Murphy “Are the Rich Cleaning Up?” Fortune, September 4, 2000.
1. Robert J. Samuelson “Pushing Economic Equality Won’t Work for U.S.,” Human Events, May 1995.
1. Walter E. Schaller “Rawls, the Difference Principle, and Economic Inequality,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, December 1998.
1. Benjamin Schwarz “Reflections on Inequality,” World Policy Journal, Winter 1995-1996.
1. Janny Scott and D. Leonhardt “Class in America: Shadowy Lines That Still Divide,” New York Times, May 15, 2005.
1. Christopher Shea “American Economy Less Dynamic than Thought,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 1997.
1. Mortimer B. Zuckerman “So the Rich Get Richer?” U.S. News & World Report, May 2, 2005.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale.
Source Citation
Krugman, Paul. “Economic Inequality Has Accelerated.” Is the Gap Between the Rich and Poor Growing ? Ed. Robert Sims. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2006. At Issue. Rpt. from “The Death of Horatio Alger: Our Political Leaders Are Doing Everything They Can to Fortify Class Inequality.” The Nation (5 Jan. 2004). Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 4 Jan. 2016.
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