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Income inequality in America has been growing rapidly, and is expected to increase [PDF]. While the widening wealth gap is a hot topic in the media and on the campaign trail, there's quite a disconnect between the perceptions of economists and those of the general public.
For instance, surveys show people tend to underestimate the income disparity between the top and bottom 20% of Americans, and overestimate the opportunity for poor individuals to climb the social ladder. Additionally, a majority of adults believe that corporations conduct business fairly despite evidence to the contrary and that the government should not act to reduce income inequality.
Even though inequality is increasing, Americans seem to believe that our social and economic systems work exactly as they should. This perspective has intrigued social scientists for decades. My colleague Andrei Cimpian and I have demonstrated in our recent research that these beliefs that our society is fair and just may take root in the first years of life, stemming from our fundamental desire to explain the world around us.
http://theconversation.com/lifes-not-fair-so-why-do-we-assume-it-is-45981
(Score: 5, Insightful) by urza9814 on Thursday September 10 2015, @06:51PM
Maybe if that 'opportunity' is who your parents are and that 'outcome' is the entirety of your life...
Otherwise you're merely demonstrating the exact delusion explained in the article.
...which is something people do *constantly*. Racism, sexism, all those other -isms...everyone's got their biases. Which largely come from the thousands of years of accumulated history that nobody living today had any influence on. It's a game that's been played for thousands of turns, and you get dropped into a random player's seat, you get ten turns to do the best you can with what you happened to be given, and then you're booted out again.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Thursday September 10 2015, @06:56PM
I don't think that anybody would argue that we have equality of opportunity that isn't trying to rationalize why they have so much more than they deserve.
I believe the point the GP is making is that efforts to provide equality need to focus on giving people equal standing from which to compete, not ensuring that everybody gets the same result.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 10 2015, @07:08PM
They may or may not have more than they deserve, that depends entirely on whether they actually cheated anybody or whether it's simply envy driven whining. And I'd argue we have close enough to equal opportunity that a couple extra hours effort a day can negate any deliberate disadvantage entirely. Not luck of the draw disadvantages like being born to rich parents, that's just fate; it's utterly fair because it's entirely random.
Second sentence you got exactly right though, Parent. I'm 100% against -ism discrimination except when you're comparing physical capability of men vs women, which is quite often irrelevant today. As long as you have the opportunity to do the work and take the risks to get ahead, you're getting a fair shake. That is what we should be striving for but most progressives do not want that, they want equality of outcome.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @07:31PM
Not luck of the draw disadvantages like being born to rich parents, that's just fate; it's utterly fair because it's entirely random.
As a white kid you have just as much chance of being born into a black family as you do of being born into a white family.
It's totally random that average black household wealth is just 6% of white household wealth. [forbes.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 10 2015, @07:37PM
No, there are plenty of reasons for that and most of them have nothing to do with race but everything to do with culture and parenting. And, yes, random is fair. Always.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @07:43PM
No, there are plenty of reasons for that and most of them have nothing to do with race but everything to do with culture and parenting.
Yeah, like the culture of red-lining and the parents who taught their children that things like red-lining were proper.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:17PM
More like the culture of ~80% out of wedlock births in the black community. Being raised in a one parent home is a hell of a lot bigger hindrance than your skin color will ever be. Mad props for the ladies (and yes, it's almost always the ladies) stuck with this chore but it doesn't change the fact that there's only one income to the home to help the child get started in life.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Friday September 11 2015, @12:51AM
More like the culture of ~80% out of wedlock births in the black community.
Wow, that's just terrible. As we all know, marriage magically fixes problems.
Being raised in a one parent home is a hell of a lot bigger hindrance than your skin color will ever be.
That's quite a different problem than people merely having children out of wedlock.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by prospectacle on Friday September 11 2015, @02:39AM
It looks like you're describing exactly the kind of unequal opportunities that can occur during the most formative and influential period of someone's life, namely their first five years.
The guidance, education, nutrition, safety, and health in this time have a massively disproportionate influence on the rest of a person's life (on average).
I would say a person's opportunities are (again, on average) more than 50% defined by their starting conditions. So the level of equality of opportunity for one generation, depends a great deal on the equality of wealth/health/education/etc of the previous generation.
So you can't have one without the other.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday September 11 2015, @03:09AM
Agreed here. I have respect for these women on the basis of my education as an Amazon, although I cannot help on that basis to wonder why they had the children in the first place. Do they not have access to contraception? Becoming pregnant is a deliberate act in the Amazon world.
Raising a child needs two parents. The Amazon model is weird in that regard. Male children are given back to the father, with knowledge that machismo will cause him to be the sole provider. Meanwhile, female children have the benefit of a village to raise them.
I have great respect for my tribe back in Qinghai, but there were questionable things that made me ultimately leave them.
(Score: 1) by OwMyBrain on Friday September 11 2015, @02:59PM
More like the culture of ~80% out of wedlock births in the black community.
Didn't you claim earlier in this thread that racism wasn't an issue any more?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Friday September 11 2015, @02:09AM
So racial and gender discrimination is cool with you? It's all random, that black woman could have been born a white man so it's all fair, am I right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @07:39PM
If it can be strongly correlated to other factors, like average education level, or IQ it would certainly not be random. Then you would have to ask yourself what exactly do you want to fix.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @07:45PM
> If it can be strongly correlated to other factors, like average education level, or IQ it would certainly not be random.
Yes, absolutely. All those factors are the result of having far less opportunity.
> Then you would have to ask yourself what exactly do you want to fix.
Make sure they have equal opportunity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @12:00AM
So u want them to have equal opportunity with no regard to their IQ or educations? So basically you want to hire people too fuckin dumb for the job. Yeah that will fix EVERYTHING, especially when they are fired 3 months later because they are utterly useless. Also giving people more money than they can make in their market place normally will not result in them misusing the funds or being taken for a ride with any number of scams because they are too dumb to hold on to the wealth. You will fix NOTHING, and just make a mess. I'm smart enough to figure out that if now dumbass brown people are being hired for my job "just because", that I can turn into a scam artist that takes them for a ride and separates them from their new-found money. I rather have an honest job, but if everything is fucked why not?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 10 2015, @08:50PM
I'm sorry, but that's not what happens. Working harder gets you ahead? Do you not pay attention to who gets ahead in the places where you work (or have you not worked in many places yet?)? It's not the hard workers or skilled people who know how to do stuff that get ahead. Or, perhaps more accurately, the people who get ahead do not get ahead because of their hard work or the things they can do and have done. They get ahead because they play politics or because they know somebody. It's sickening. It's the opposite of the meritocracy that the Powers-that-Be try so hard to convince all of us we live in, so that we'll blame ourselves for not working hard enough instead of blaming them, and then proceed to work even harder hoping for the pat on the head from the wise- and powerful leader.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:26PM
I've worked, as a minority, in bullshit minimum wage jobs, the military, several trades, and eventually moved on to the tech industry in general. My race has not once hindered me and my finances are my own problem not anyone else's. I recently shut down my own business to move to TN with a friend. So, yes, you can with hard work and, let me stress this as highly important, brains get ahead in life.
Hard work or brains alone won't get you shit except frustration though and nobody ever said they would who knew their ass from a hole in the ground.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 11 2015, @01:53AM
Then good for you, but you're damn lucky. Or perhaps you're too young to have experienced that luck not holding out. Many smart, hard-working young people who've been fortunate enough to skate through those shoals think they're bulletproof. Then they hit a rock.
I hope you don't, ever. I hope you do sail on and make the world a little bit better. But even if you do, it doesn't prove that race doesn't matter or that the system isn't rigged. The hard stats show it is: decade-on-decade decline in real wages in the face of skyrocketing productivity, greater and greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands, middle-class households struggling to make ends meet despite dual incomes, etc. If you don't fit that, then you're what they call an outlier. Not because you're smarter or harder working than the others, but through pure stochastic noise.
Washington DC delenda est.