Income inequality is a result of capitalism that is regularly criticized and debated on. The main point of this article was to examine if the amount of income inequality was increased or decreased from the time of the Gilded age (1865-1900). What was found was that there has been major cycles of income inequality throughout the history of the US. Times such as the gilded age and today are fairly similar in the amount of income inequality, but there are also times with lower income inequality including the progressive era (1920's) and the great depression (1929-1933). A historian, Nell Painter, says, “We’re in these cycles in which we learn and forget and learn and forget.” The difference found between the Gilded Age and now is that people today don't like to allow other people to know their social class; conversely, during the Gilded Age, wealthy people flaunted their money.
http://time.com/5122375/american-inequality-gilded-age/
3 comments:
I think this is an interesting comparison, especially because it shows that income inequality is cyclical. I wonder what public opinion would show about the periods of time with lower income inequality, since there were many people who opposed FDR's New Deal during one of the cited time periods above. If we are currently in a period that is similar to the Gilded Age, I think that would say that a period of lower income inequality should be cycling through pretty soon. I love that quote from Nell Painter, but I wonder if in the age of social media and constant information processing, if society knows but has stopped caring. Or rather, if society knows, but have put the blame on something other than the economic system itself.
I agree that it's cyclical, but I very much disagree with the idea that the rich aren't flaunting their wealth. This may be true for upper-middle-class Americans who want to say they belong to the middle class, but the extremely wealthy are absolutely flaunting - think about the entire media empires that have risen up around the Kardashians and Paris Hilton and material presentations of wealth.
Income inequality is a big issue in a country and I believe that this could not be totally eliminated. Government plays an important role while maintaining the income structure to be balanced and I think when the income inequality is increasing, the government has to do some regulations on it, such as increasing minimum wage. The news mentioned that income inequality is cyclical, so by looking at the past, the government should learn something and know what to do to fix it.
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