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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) by Murdoc on Friday September 11 2015, @07:59PM
I'm sorry, but that's a widely circulated myth about the USSR. Their relatively small income diversity had nothing to do with either incentive to work or their collapse. The first is because there are reasons to work other than money. Some are internal, such as altruism, sense of duty, belief in a cause (in this case Communism), or even just love of what you're doing. External ones include fame and respect from peers. One only needs to look at the worlds of volunteers and free software to see a lot of examples of people working despite not getting paid for it (indeed they are even 'punished' for it since they could be spending that time and effort to make more money). Most often people will seek to excel if they are given adequate opportunity to work in a field they love. In fact, usually money can work as a disincentive in cases like this.
As for the collapse, that happened because of two reasons: 1) the USSR was a dictatorship, which caused harsh conditions for many and thus social friction. People often blame socialism or communism (which they never actually practiced, it was their goal not their economic model) for these conditions, but it was the socialism that made life better there, and the dictatorship that made it harsh. They are two different things but of course the capitalists of the west want you to believe that it was the other way around. Which brings me to 2) the west did everything in their power to bring the USSR down, because if they succeeded, then people would start to question whether capitalism was really better or not, and our leaders couldn't have that, or else they wouldn't have been able to keep widening the income divide like they have been since. The fact that the USSR was a dictatorship played into their hands, making it easy to confuse people into conflating their politics with their economics. So socialism in the USSR didn't fail, it was defeated.