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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:36PM
The closest thing [...] to equality of outcome was the USSR
Swallowed a bunch of Cold War bullshit, did you?
Clearly, you didn't notice what happened immediately after the USSR collapsed.
The same bunch of dudes who had been in charge (the buddies of the dictator) scooped up the means of production when that was privatized.
The system was still rigged against the workers (whether that system is State Capitalism or overt profit-driven privatized Capitalist Oligarchy aka Fascism).
.
A list of some the best examples of egalitarianism is contained in my post up the thread.
The Iroquois in North America is an example that predated the ones involving folks of European ancestry.
A recent example (dating from the late 1970s) is Marinaleda, [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [jacobinmag.com] a Socialist society so successful that they abolished their police force.
-- gewg_