Wealth Inequality Analysis

Income inequality has been a major issue in American history. There are many different factors that contribute to inequality. These include education, wealth, discrimination, ability, and monopoly power.

In William Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies” a plane crashes on an island in the pacific with no sign of civilization. The plane is gone and all that's left is a group of little boys and one of them is like one of Thomas Hobbes prediction. Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy was the strongest and meanest man would take power and rule over everyone else, but Locke’s philosophy is people are naturally good and will find reason. Jack is Hobbes’s prediction of a immoral ruler who made his own rules and kept order.

This first lecture gave us a close look into the unequal share of wealth and the factors that determine the wealth of individuals in the American society. One of the first factors that affect immensely the inequality in America is the obsessiveness of wanting to classify people and make them mark a box for their gender, race and class. Where men and whites have more privileges than any other person and are not only paid higher, but would most likely spend less time in prison for committing the same crime as an African American. The United states is so unequal that the top 1% of the population has 38.1% of the wealth and the bottom 40% which is a little less than half of the people living in America only have 0.2% of the wealth. And as if that statistic alone was not scary enough, we learn in this

There is no doubt that wealth inequality in America has been escalating quickly; the portion of total income earned by the top one percent has doubled since the beginning of the 1970’s. The wealthy are the main beneficiaries

According to Inequality.org, “We equate wealth with ‘net worth,’ the sum total of your assets minus liabilities. Assets can include everything from an owned personal residence and cash in savings accounts to investments in stocks/bonds, real estate, and retirement accounts. Liabilities cover what a household owes: a car loan, credit card balance, student loan, mortgage, or any other bill yet to be paid. In the United States, wealth inequality runs even more pronounced than income inequality” (Wealth). Wealth disparity affects everyone in America. When the top twenty percent of earners in America take over fifty percent of total earnings in any given year, It can be see as very unfair by anyone who is in the middle class and especially the lower class of citizens in the U.S. It is safe to say that both sides of the political world (Republicans and Democrats) are equally worried about how economic inequality will affect their children and future generations. No matter who you ask, rich or poor, and whatever their opinion on the shape of economic distribution in America is, they most likely have a unrealistic sense of the state it is actually in.

David Leonhardt, the writer of the essay, “Inequality Has Been Going on Forever… but That Doesn’t Mean it is inevitable” is responding to Thomas Piketty’s writing “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” that talks about how income inequality has always risen in history, and seems to be inevitable. David Leonhardt believes income inequality is not inevitable, and provides the reader with ways income inequality can be overcome. With only about a 5-page essay, with only little information on how income inequality can become non-inevitable, he needs some more support. After reading Monica Pott’s writing “What’s Killing Poor White Women?” I’ve realized the material discussed in her essay could be incorporated in Leonhardt’s essay to help him better support his argument. Leonhardt could touch on the things Potts has wrote about in her story about a poor woman, who has found herself without a lack of a good education, access to medical care, good wages, and a healthy lifestyle that comes from being in poverty. Leonhardt could’ve incorporated the problems discussed in Pott’s writing to support his argument by writing about the problems poor, less educated rural Americans face. To better support his argument he could have wrote about how the less educated rural Americans deal with scarce job opportunities, have less access to medical care, and develop unhealthy lifestyles as a result of

James Madison once stated inequality of the rich and poor predicament to be “evil” and believed that the government should avoid an “immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches” (Johnston, 2016). As one of the founding fathers of our nation, James Madison had a concern about the separation between the rich and the poor. He felt the government should do what it could to avoid the separation, which one can infer that he meant for the government to tax the rich by a greater percentage, thus reducing the financial burden on the poor. A rift has always been present between the rich and the poor throughout history. Depending upon the job, the working class may or may not make enough to support a family. At this point, the

This is a topic that had been lingering in the shadows until the Occupy Wall street movement made many take a good look at the inequalities that exist all across the board. Vidal states that “the outrage of Occupy was directed at the top 1 percent of the population, an elite class consisting mainly of investment bankers, corporate executives, and layers who currently own 35 percent of the total net wealth in the United States.” (Anderson pg 270) Vidal explains that in order for us to fully understand economic inequality we need to take a look at the stagnation of living standards experienced by millions of

Corporations and businesses should take responsibility in devising multiple solutions that help society as a whole. In Joseph Stiglitz’s essay “Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society” shows the corruption of wealth inequality in society. While, in Ethan Watters’ essay “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan” shows the corruption of Western pharmaceutical companies shaping culture to market depression in Japan. [Drug marketing is a big problem in today’s society since big firms neglect their obligation to share the profits with others in society. Both Watters and Stiglitz offer objections to the economic markets in America as unjust due to market competition, false marketing techniques, opposition to cultural or income differences,

The way money is distributed within the United States is unbalanced, with the majority of the wealthy owning the bulk of the country’s wealth. Wealth can be defined as a person’s assets and monetary gains. This unequal distribution has caused numerous economic and geographical problems, such as how resources are divided among countries, how developed or industrialized a country is in relation to wealth distribution and the wide spread of disease and lack of medical attention due to an absence of money. In this paper I will address the negative and positive aspects associated with wealth distribution. I will explain how resource distribution contributes to an area’s economic growth. I will also discuss varying ways to measure wealth

Income inequality has been a major concern around the world, and it mainly links to how economic metrics are distributed among individuals in a country. Economists generally categorise these metrics in wealth, income and consumption. Wilkinson and Picket (2009) showed in their studies that inequality has drawbacks that lead to social problems. This is because income inequality and wealth concentration can hinder or delay long term growth. In 2011, International Monetary Fund economists showed that less income inequality increased the duration of countries’ economic growth spells more than free trade, low government corruption, foreign investment or low foreign debt (Berg and Ostry, 2011).

Every American dreams of finding a job that pays well enough so that they may comfortably take care of their loved ones and themselves for years to come. Most Americans hope to find some way to make a living that they enjoy, something that they view as productive. Unfortunately, many do not have this luxury. In our society, a good portion of the population is forced to hold the base of our country in place while hardly being redeemed for their time and effort, and thus the problem of income inequality. Numbers of these people live from paycheck to paycheck, barely getting by, not because they manage their money poorly, but because the value of their time at work is negligible.

The wealth gap. It affects us all; old or young, male or female, and-- most importantly-- rich or poor. It’s what separates the most powerful and highest-paid people in America from the rest of us. It’s an issue that receives some attention, but perhaps not enough. The richest 1% of the U.S. owns more wealth than the bottom 90%, and that’s not the only reality of this issue. You see, this is a social and economic problem contributing to a plethora of other big problems here in the U.S., including child poverty, the dwindling middle-class, and the fact that the majority of American citizens have absolutely zero impact on public policy. Here’s the thing—the wealth gap is increasing, rapidly. Not much has been done to address this issue, and there’s a large group of people who don’t want anything done (guess who). I, among others, believe solving this issue opens the door to finding a solution to an abundance of other issues.

In any given population, there is a difference between what people within the population earn. The uneven distribution of income in any given population is income inequality. In order for there to be income, there has to be several sources of income. These sources of income may be combinational or independent per person receiving the income. Income may result from wages, rent, bank account interests, salaries or even profits made in business transactions ( Stiglitz, 2012).

Throughout the last semester, this class has taught me many important lessons and opened my eyes to problems in our society. Whether it be realizations about my own masculinity and how masculinity came to be to the idea of identifying people by their “class” or level of wealth. With all the important lessons learned from this course it’s difficult to narrow it down to just five. However, I believe the most vital lessons I’ve learned from the material through this semester is the overwhelming evidence of wealth inequality in the United States and how it directly affects me, the fact that we as Americans don’t live in the pure democracy I once thought we did, race and crime and how closely they are intertwined was stomach turning for me,