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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 Friday September 11 2015, @04:13AM
I found out that he had lost his job a few years back, a hard job just to pay the bills, not live. Just survive. Unemployment ran out at about the same time they were evicted from their home (had a wife). Turned out to be a fairly intelligent man, but now in his 60s.
60-what? He should be collecting Social Security now or soon. That's the original government program to force irresponsible people to save for retirement, and it works pretty well in that.
I'm not doubting your story in particular, but I have a hard time believing the narrative these stories purport to tell because it just doesn't mesh with my experience at all, or with statistics. I teach at a college, and every single one of our students has gotten a job basically straight out of college. We track them, and every single one of our graduates gets a job within 6 months or something.
"Age discrimination" is what you'll say, I know. I'm sure there's some of that, but, well, some of my co-workers from my time in industry still have jobs, and they are probably getting close-ish to retirement these days. More importantly, 100% employment of new college graduates is not just notable, it's economically unhealthy, even. There should be SOMEONE who can't find a job in 6 months, just by bad luck. So the STEM shortage seems real to me.
In any event, no one's guaranteed a job. Layoffs are part of the way workers are made to go where they can do the most good. Protectionism may have allowed that man to keep his job, but it would have done that by causing stagnation in the labor market. You should always have savings, because you always might lose your job. If you make $10K a year, then, sure, I don't blame you for not having savings when you get bad luck. If you make $100K, then you were irresponsible in the extreme. What, did HP not offer him a 401K? I'm sure they did. Did he not enroll in it? Probably not, based on his situation. Someone making 100K a year for 20 years who has no savings and ends up homeless when laid off must have made some pretty bad life decisions. Perhaps those life decisions also affected his work. Perhaps these anonymous stories of age discrimination are also cases of personality/other personal problems making someone unemployable, and the individual blames "the system" instead of looking in a mirror.
Now, all that said, we shouldn't have homeless people in the US. From this perspective, I don't really care about his irresponsibility; most homeless people have mental health issues of some sort and poor impulse control leading to poor financial management is a mental health issue. We should have government-run shelters for people who lack the capacity -- for whatever reason -- to support themselves. There's no excuse for us, as a society, not taking care of the destitute. It's just that forcing companies to employ people they don't want would be neither an effective nor an efficient way of doing that.