We all know there’s inequality in our beloved country. We all see how corporations are favored by governments and how the people running them are hand in hand with the people that should be representing us and our interests.
We are overworked, underpaid and overtaxed. We are the ones paying their salaries and we are the ones doing all the work while they sit in their offices, sign papers and schedule meetings all day long.
A Harvard Business School professor and economist asked more than 5000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the US and here’s what he’d found.
The question: Dividing the country into 5 rough groups of Top, Bottom and three in the Middle so each should account for 20% of population, how do you think wealth is distributed? How do you think is the ideal distribution? Here’s what they answered:
So Americans believe the distribution to be skewed, and 92% of people involved said that it should be more equal as you can see in the picture above. People think that the richest 20% have about half of the available wealth while the next group has about a quarter and the third group have a half of what is left, that is an eighth of total wealth and so on.
That is a fairly logical explanation, but we know it’s much worse and here’s how bad it actually is:
That is, 40% of the whole US population is too poor to be on the chart. You can barely see them near the left end. Let’s have a look at how rich are the guys at the top and we find that the top 1% has more of the country’s wealth than what 9 out of 10 Americans believe the entire top 20% should have.
The top 1% fat cats have 40% of the country’s wealth. That is filthy rich. This leaves 80% of the country population, to share 7% of the total wealth. That is, the Bottom group and the three groups in the Middle combined have 7% of the whole country’s wealth.
You can see how 80% of Americans’ income stayed the same while the greedy bastards at the top got richer. This here is a “boiling frog” example if I ever saw one. Take a pot of water, heat it to boil, try throwing in a frog and see what happens. The frog will jump back out in the blink of an eye. Take the same frog, place it in a pot of cool water, put it on the stove and start heating it gradually. If you do it slow enough, the frog won’t notice anything until it’s too late.
By increasing taxes and investing our hard earned money into their own pockets and their own phantom companies, we saw middle class people had to take on extra time or secondary jobs. With trade barriers down, jobs got shipped to Asia, and with increasing immigration, local jobs are even harder to get by. The wealthy 1% has been slowly heating up the pot so to say and here’s what happened from the early 80’s until they started the recession and soon enough Obama came and everything went downhill from there.
How do you feel about wealth inequality in America? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Thank you for your article. Are there any charts past 2007? I didn’t see a date for the Harvard study…perhaps it is more recent. Please let us know those dates as your closing statement would seem to warrant that or some actual statistics since 2008.
Dear Sirs,
I feel that you have missed a certain point, that is, there is no standard to judge your ‘inequality’ by. The current system of currency (Federal Reserve Notes) are issued without any backing and/or only moderate controls. The ‘inequality’ you show could be easily changed or skewed by ‘dropping money from helicopters’ as one politician suggested. If the currency were to disappear, the present ‘poor’ man with a used car might be richer than the multi-billionair who has purchased everything they ‘own’ on credit and will have it confiscated to meet his debt.
Envy is one of most human of traits. We cannot help but have feelings of envy when we see the wealth and largess of others. Greed is the shadow side of human emotions. Both of these traits have been with humans since we formed social groups. Greed is fed by opportunity, and Envy is fed by “others” greed. Differences in wealth at the individual level usually cause little harm, but when it is so widespread as now is the case, social unrest is bound to happen and it can become very violent. We are just entering this latter phase and better do something about it or suffer the social consequences, another whole story.