How Income Inequality and Economic Mobility Threaten the American Dream (2013)
The stats are grim. Since the 1970s, the incomes of the bottom 90% have been stagnating while the income of the top 1% have soared. In fact, the average pre-tax income for the bottom 90 percent of households is almost $900 below what it was in 1979, and for the top one percent the average pre-tax income is over $700,000 above its 1979 level
Economic mobility is the ability of an individual, family or some other
group to improve (or lower) their economic status—usually measured in
income. Economic mobility is often measured by movement between income
quintiles. Economic mobility may be considered a type of social
mobility, which is often measured in change in income.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic...
Socio-economic
mobility in the United States refers to the movement of Americans from
one social class or economic level to another, often by changing jobs or
marrying. This "vertical" mobility can be the change in socioeconomic
status between parents and children ("inter-generational"); or over the
course of a lifetime ("intra-generational"). It typically refers to
"relative mobility" — the chance that an American's income/status will
rise or fall compared to others in another income/status group—but can
also be "absolute"—whether (and by how much) living standards in America
have increased.
Belief in strong social and economic
mobility—that Americans can and do rise from humble origins to
riches—has been called a "civil religion", "the bedrock upon which the
American story has been anchored", and part of the American identity
(the American Dream), celebrated in the lives of famous Americans such
as Benjamin Franklin and Henry Ford, and in popular culture (from the
books of Horatio Alger and Norman Vincent Peale to the song "Movin' on
Up"). Opinion polls show that this belief has been both stronger in the
US than in years past, and stronger than in other developed countries.
However, in recent years several large studies have found that vertical
inter-generational mobility is lower, not higher, in the US than in
those countries.
The Brookings Institution said in 2013 that income
inequality was increasing and becoming permanent, sharply reducing
social mobility.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-ec...
Income
inequality in the United States has grown significantly since the early
1970s, after several decades of stability, and has been the subject of
study of many scholars and institutions. While inequality has risen
among most developed countries, and especially English-speaking ones, it
is highest in the United States. Income inequality (as measured by the
Gini coefficient) is not uniform among the states: after-tax income
inequality in 2009 was greatest in Texas and lowest in Maine.
Most
of the growth has been between the middle class and top earners, with
the disparity becoming more extreme the further one goes up in the
income distribution.[12] A 2011 study by the CBO[13] found that the top
earning 1 percent of households increased their income by about 275%
after federal taxes and income transfers over a period between 1979 and
2007, compared to a gain of just under 40% for the 60 percent in the
middle of America's income distribution.[13] Other sources find that the
trend has continued since then.[14] In spite of this data, only 42% of
Americans think inequality has increased in the past ten years.[15] In
2012, the gap between the richest 1 percent and the remaining 99 percent
was the widest it's been since the 1920s.[16] Incomes of the wealthiest
1 percent rose nearly 20 percent, whereas the income of the remaining
99 percent rose 1 percent in comparison.[16]
Scholars and others
differ as to the causes, solutions, and the significance of the
trend,[17] which in 2011 helped ignite the "Occupy" protest movement.
Education and increased demand for skilled labor are often cited as
causes,[18] some have emphasized the importance of public policy; others
believe the cause(s) of inequality's rise are not well understood.[13]
Inequality has been described both as irrelevant in the face of economic
opportunity (or social mobility) in America, and as a cause of the
decline in that opportunity.[19][20][21]
Yale professor and economist
Robert J. Shiller, who was among three Americans who won the Nobel
prize for economics in 2013, believes that rising economic inequality in
the United States and other countries is "the most important problem
that we are facing now today."[22] Pope Francis echoed this sentiment in
his Evangelii Gaudium, stating that "as long as the problems of the
poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of
markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes
of inequality, no solution will be found for the world's problems or,
for that matter, to any problems."[23] President Barack Obama referred
to the widening income gap as the "defining challenge of our time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_i...
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