Rising Inequality

At the National Head Start Association's Winter Leadership Institute last week, Don Mathis, President of the Community Action Partnership, speaking about the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, cited three sources on rising inequality:

First was Working for the Few, an Oxfam briefing paper sharing these points of concern:

• Almost half of the world's wealth is now owned by just 1 percent of the population.
• The wealth of the 1 percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion.  That's 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world's population.
• In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

Second was a Harvard report, "What We Know about Wealth" in which Michael Norton observed that though inequality is real in the US with 20 percent owning 80 percent of the wealth, the average American believes that the inequality is much less dramatic.  Norton observed that the reason people's perceptions about inequality are so skewed is "because the easy availability of credit masks people's real financial situation."

Third was The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009) in which Richard Wilkinson demonstrates that the well being of individuals is always greatest in countries with the lowest levels of inequality.  He observes there are "pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, and encouraging excessive consumption."

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