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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:53PM
Just one thing to point out about spousal abuse, as someone who grew up in a family with an abusive parent:
Abuse is often the response of the individual to having been abused as a child, although not always.
In my family, my mother was the abuser. She abused and assaulted my father until he left, then had him charged with assaulting her after she punched herself until she was covered in bruises.
She physically assaulted me as a toddler, the damage she caused is lifelong and no amount of therapy can repair it. (It's physical, neurological, in nature.) My father left, and we didn't get to see him for five years because she convinced the court he was a danger to her and us as children.
Meanwhile, as a child, I was beaten with electrical cables and vacuum cleaner attachments. I was shoved into walls, verbally abused, and of course, psychologically abused.
My father, as a child, lived through some very weird abuse, things like not being allowed to wear trousers until he was 13, and stuff he won't even talk about. He had brothers who were paranoid schizophrenic, and he ended up in a number of foster homes. My mother, on the other hand, had a fairy tale upbringing yet she has some serious psychological (presumably organic or structural) issues.