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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: 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.