Reflections on inequality: 'the promise of American life.' (economic inequality in the US)
World Policy Journal › Vol. 12 Nbr. 4, December 1995
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Summary
Americans live in a society characterized by economic inequality. Since the mid-1980s, a large number of articles have been published on the increasing gap between rich and poor. However, it is shown that economic inequality has existed since the 1800s, and has gone relatively unnoticed until the 1980s. It is also argued that inequality is the result of the political economy advocated by liberals and conservatives.
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Reflections on inequality: 'the promise of American life.' (economic inequality in the US)
While liberal capitalism (or to use the current administration's nomenclature, "market democracy") was triumphing over communism around the globe, a funny thing happened here at home: Americans discovered that their society was riven by gross economic inequality. Commentators are mistaken when they tell us that this inequality is something new, however, and they are therefore wrong in believing that inequality in itself threatens American society. But the forces behind the rise in inequality today do present an unprecedented challenge to social peace in America.
Over the past ten years, the publication of articles and books on this subject has snowballed. Citing statistics from Census Bureau studies and the Congressional Budget Office Green Book, they point to the recent decline in the incomes of a large number of U.S. households compared to the incomes of the wealthiest U.S. households, which have gone steadily upward. These works note with alarm the number of manufacturing jobs being lost, and they contrast this situation with the 1950s and 1960s when, the reader could be forgiven for inferring, most working families apparently had a house in the suburbs, two cars, and a fat college savings account for the children. Ominously warning of the widening gap between rich and poor and of a declining middle class, the ...See the full content of this document
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