What Wasn't Said in 'Wealth Inequality In America'

The distribution of wealth in America is dramatically lopsided towards the 1% - a point vividly demonstrated in "Wealth Inequality in America," and agreed upon by both professors. For many, there is something intuitively and philosophically unfair about this inequality. "We are the 99%!" is a mantra of Occupy Wall Street's dissatisfaction, and a protest against America's status quo.

"Wealth Inequality in America" draws a striking picture, but is that the whole story?

Professor Horwitz says that "Wealth Inequality in America" misses a central point: do the poor in our society regularly lift themselves out of poverty? "How easy is it, or how difficult is it, for folks who start off poor, to no longer be poor?"

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[Kleavers]

Social mobility in the United States is absolutely terrible when compared to other modern countries.

[WickedLenn]

Maslow's hierarchy of needs:
5. Self-actualization.
4. Esteem
3. Love/Belonging
2. Safety
1. Physiological
To put it like this: if you don't have enough money to buy food, or a place to sleep, in a safe area, you're just not going to be in a position to achieve. And that is quite a few people in this country who aren't in that position.
Considering we also live in a consumerist economy, the top 1% are satiated; their needs and wants are met and they cannot possibly circulate all of that money.

[volkerball]

"The data on income mobility suggests that the poor in any one year, the majority of them, have a good opportunity to be out of poverty within a reasonable number of years."

So why the fuck AREN'T they? How are people supposed to pull themselves up(by their bootstraps, I assume) when the attitude in this country is that you're not "supposed" to be able to survive on minimum wage? That if you're not on minimum wage and struggling just to scrape by, then it means the country is doomed? When even the suggestion of trying to make the minimum wage keep up with inflation is met with frothing anger?

This video debunked nothing.

[realkhumanbean]

what he also doesn't point out is that, if you start out in the bottom 20%, you're twice as likely to stay there or even grow poorer, while when you're in top 20%, you're twice as likely than any other people to stay there and grow richer.

[andchi]

That's the problem - it's not always legitimate. It's through foul play, lobbyism and corruption in general. Many of those multi-billion corporations in the US got most of their billions buying congress.

And if you think it makes sense that one person can have so much money that his family could spend millions of dollars/day for generations while others (in the same country) lives on the street, then something has gone terribly wrong...

[burgesskj]

I feel so much better, now that I know that next year I might have as much wealth as RMoney, or Buffet.

[ForeverRepublic]

Equal opportunity doesn't guarantee equal outcome.
Deal with it liberals.

[skylerbowerbank]

Ok, at first i was like, who cares

Now, i think this is the most important video on the internet

[shindousan]

Income and wealth are two VERY different things, mr. economist. The more accumulated wealth, the lower the need for income. What the tables in "Get The Most Recent Data" really reveal are the natural variation in income through career progression and retirement.

[SirTenenbaum]

Here are some actual numbers on income mobility. According to a study from economists from the U.S. Treasury: Between 1987-1996 and 1996-2005, "roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom income quintile moved up to a higher income group by the end of each period."

As for children,  27 percent of the 35-to-40-year-olds whose parents were in the bottom quintile in 1987 were also there in 2007, while 10 percent had made it into the top quintile. On the other hand, 39 percent of the kids whose parents were in top quintile in 1987 were still there in 2007; 9 percent had fallen to the bottom. 

Income Mobility in the United States: New Evidence from Income Tax Data
Authors: Gerald Auten, Geoffrey Gee
National Tax Journal

[MountainOfMoses]

Not only that but you have to weed out those who are only counted as poor temporarily. Middle class college kids come to mind. Often those who act skeptical about income distribution point to mobility then never acknowledge who is actually moving up and down.

[suplunch]

That's how it's done kids. Pretend to argue one point, and then change the topic completely and argue that point instead. The film wasn't about if people can get out of

[magus]

The idea that income mobility matters at all when CEOs take home HUNDREDS of times more than the average employee is ridiculous.

[ParadoxPerspective]

A a systems architect manager, I can say that there are many paralells between the liquidity of individuals and the load on a core within a multi-core processor.

Some applications are best handled by high-load volume cores, while most are much more efficient when you can break a load down to smaller chunk-sizes and spread those chunks across many cores.

Income inequality, to me, is like a risk of unstable processor load allocation.

[WeAreAllGeeksHere]

Exactly.
If it happens often enough that people get bumped down because others are making more money while theirs remains consistent, the curve gradually flattens out, like in the "ideal" graph.
If it happens often enough that people get bumped down because they don't have as much as they did before, the curve gets more lopsided, like in the actual graph.
You see?

[ThePyro]

"In other words you can not generate wealth without financially disadvantaging someone."

Please provide an objective definition of "wealth".

[daemonk]

if people were serious, there is no place income could hide

[ocruadlaoic]

This goes against most studies that have concluded that it is very difficult and unlikely to move up or down from he class(lower, middle, upper) which you are born into. It happens but it is the everyone could just wait their turn. Doesn't work like that.

[kanzbgz]

I think the idea is that a single person could be poor when they're young, middle class when they're in their early working years and "rich" by the time they're in their 40s-50s. Thats why this sort of data is misleading.

[hausler]

All of these Libertarians keep saying that if there isn't a viciously unbalanced difference between rich and poor then we would immediately fall into communism. What they seem to overlook is the fact that the lower 80% of society looks more like socialism because the middle class is barely different than the poor.