Select Page
By Ray Williams
October 12, 2020

 

Rising economic inequality is threatening not only economic progress but also the democratic political system in the U.S.The deadly combination of COVID-19 and the accompanying economic recession has led to a deep crisis for working people and the poor trying to survive this perfect storm.

Even before the tsunami of COVID-19 hit the shores of the United States, working-class communities of color and the most oppressed faced deep levels of poverty, income inequality, budget cuts to social and public spending, and a ratcheting up of racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant racism from the forces of hate. We have witnessed an increase in violence towards Black and Asian workers, families, and youth across the country.

The spread of COVID-19 has incited a vast level of fear and anxiety throughout the US, inspiring a sense of powerlessness, economic insecurity, and corrosion of social support. As most of the country grapples with shelter-in-place orders, these conditions only exacerbate community instability, structural inequity, and the safety of vulnerable populations.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the persistence of violent crime. While overall crime has declined in many cities, the U.S. saw more than 2,100 firearm deaths between March and late April — the highest tally in that period since 2016. Nonfatal shootings also remain steady or have seen similar increases in places like Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit. In these cities, areas where COVID-19 is spreading rapidly, black Americans were already10 times more likely to die from gun homicide than white Americans before the pandemic.

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that African-Americans are at increased risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19, largely due to pre-existing disparities in health, structural racism, and deeper inequities in health access and economic opportunity. These same structural inequities drive overlapping challenges of community violence. As COVID-19 hurls the country into an economic recession, the barriers to health, housing, and employment will disproportionately impact those who already had limited access to those resources before the pandemic.

There are at least four ways the COVID-19 pandemic is increasing inequality:

  • First, higher-paid workers are working from home while lower-paid blue-collar workers typically do not have this option.
  • Second, a higher share of low-paid workers are in essential services such as nursing, policing, teaching, cleaning, refuse removal, and store attendants where they are more likely to come into contact with people who are infected.
  • Third, lower paid workers are more represented in the sectors that have suspended activities such as hotels, restaurants and tourism services.
  • Fourth, the pandemic is increasing poverty and inequality between richer countries that can afford to bail out their firms and provide social safety nets, and poorer countries that do not have the capacity to do so.

A recent survey of 37 countries indicates that 3 in 4 households suffered declining income since the start of the pandemic, with 82% of poorer households affected. The impacts on different communities depends entirely on their specific circumstances. In the US, for example, over 2 million more households claim that they do not have enough to eat since the pandemic. In fact, one in five African American households says they are going hungry.

 

The pandemic is a boon for the ultra-rich. The staggering rise in the stock-market is testament to this. In the US, over 44 million people lost their jobs and unemployment surged towards 15% between April and June 2020. Yet the fortunes of the top five billionaires rose by $102 billion, increasing their wealth by 26%. In fact, the combined wealth of US billionaires increased by over $637 billion to a total of $3.6 trillion, which is considerably more than the entire wealth of the 54 countries on the African continent.

Some of the biggest winners are those with high stakes in the technology sector. Digital retail vendors, conferencing platforms and social media groups have reaped the benefit from the lockdown and the shift to remote work.

The increasing concentration of in-country inequality is signalled in the latest book, Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years. Between 1980 and 2020, billionaires in the US saw their wealth soar by 1,130%, increasing more than 200 faster than median wages. At the same time, the tax obligations of billionaires in the US declined by 78% between 1980 and 2018 (measured as a percentage of their wealth).

Among high-income countries, for example, the US has the highest level of wealth inequality, the second highest level of income inequality, after taxes and government transfers, and one of the lowest levels of intergenerational mobility. An individual’s future is largely determined by their parents’ income. In 2020 alone, children will inherit around $764 billion and pay an average of just 2.1% on this income. By contrast for working people, the average tax rate is 15.8%, seven times more. These disparities are further skewed by race, and the racial wealth gap is even larger than it was in 1968, at the peak of the struggle for civil rights.

Gender inequality increasing

Women, alongside the poor, elderly, disabled and migrant populations, have borne the brunt of the fallout from the pandemic. In the US, women accounted for 55% of all jobs lost, even though they make up under half of the total workforce. In the UK, women were about one third more likely to be working in a sector that shut down. And when they could continue working, mothers were one-and-a-half times more likely to stop work than fathers. Their greater loss reflects the fact that women are more likely to work in the services such as catering and hospitality which were closed down. These trends are likely to set back progress in gender equality.

In previous recessions, men have borne the brunt of job losses, due to the sensitivity of sectors such as construction and manufacturing to economic cycles. By contrast, the employment of women was more stable. This time is different. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit industries that are consumer-facing hardest, including small shops, restaurants, and airlines. In the UK, for example, an estimated two-thirds of the extra 40 hours a week of caring and childcare is conducted by mothers. And mothers working at home are 50% more likely to be interrupted than men.

Ethnic inequalities on the rise

As with previous crises, minorities are hit harder and recovering more slowly from the COVID-19 induced downturn. This is true both for workers and small businesses. Within a month of the pandemic hitting the US, 22% of small businesses went under. While 17% of white owned businesses failed, 41% of black owned businesses collapsed. One reason for this disparity is due to the way pandemic hotspots concentrated in poorer neighbourhoods. Black-owned businesses also generally had weaker underlying finances, fewer reserves, and much weaker contacts with banks and financial institutions empowered by the government to administer emergency grants.

The ethnic dimensions of inequality are clearly apparent in New York. Just 7% of the firms in the Bronx received grants, compared toover 12% in wealthier counties. In the UK, similar patterns are apparent. Whereas the medianwhite British household has assets worth £282,000, for Black Caribbean households its less than a third of this (£89,000), for Black Africans barely 8% (£24,000), and Bangladeshi just 7% (£22,000). Wealth inequalities reflect inequalitieson other dimensions, including with respect to income, where on average black workers earn 9% and Bangladeshi 20% less than white workers in Britain.

The pandemic is deepening geographic inequality with people living in poor places being more vulnerable to the health and economic impacts of the pandemic. Within rich countries, lower-income neighbourhoods are most at risk. For example, in New Orleans, people living on streets with a higher proportion of Black people were two to three times more likely to die from COVID-19 than streets with white people. These are also neighbourhoods previously devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Meanwhile, In the erstwhile industrial heartland of the UK, especially Yorkshire and the East Midlands, one in three jobs were lost or are at risk since the pandemic hit. This compares to London and its commuter belt where fewer than one in five jobs fall in this category.

Inequality creeping up between countries

COVID-19 may end up being the most significant development setback of our lifetimes. The pandemic is reversing decades of progress in poverty reduction, the promotion of education, health improvements and overall wellbeing as the livelihoods of billions of people are being destroyed. There are signs that the pandemic may have pushed at least an additional 100 million people into extreme poverty. What is more, acute hunger doubled in 2020 to 260 million people. Indeed, many more people will die of starvation and poverty-related causes than the direct health impacts of COVID-19.

Bad as they are, the economic impacts of COVID-19 are still hidden from view. This is because roughly a third of workers worldwide, around 2 billion people, work in the informal sector. Most of these jobs are in developing countries. The livelihoods of an estimated 1.6 billion, or 80% of the total are threatened by the pandemic. While the stringency of the lockdowns in lower- and medium-income countries match and in many cases exceed those of wealthier countries, their governments are far less able to support their citizens and firms.

The IMF estimates that developing countries require $2.5 trillion to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet they have received less than $100 billion, which is less than 1% of what the rich countries have unlocked for their economies. To make matters even worse, at a time of unparalleled crisis, overseas aid budgets are contracting since they are typically calculated as a share of wealthier nations’ national income. When the donor economies contract, so does aid. UK aid, for example, in 2020 is down several billion pounds from the previous year.

 

 

In the United States, the increase in the income share of the top one per cent is at its highest level since the eve of the Great Depression. In India, the number of billionaires has increased tenfold in the past decade. In Europe, poor people struggle with post-recovery austerity policies while moneyed investors benefit from bank bailouts. Africa has had a resource boom in the last decade but most people there still struggle daily for food, clean water and health care.

Let’s take a look at the evidence for increasing income inequality and its negative impact:

  • The poorest half of the Earth’s population owns 1% of the Earth’s wealth. The richest 1% of the Earth’s population owns 46%; The poorest half of the U.S. population owns 2.5% of the country’s wealth. The top 1% owns 40% of it.
  • The United States is the most economically stratified society in the western world. As The Wall Street Journal reported, a recent study found that the top .01% or 14,000 American families hold 22.2% of wealth, and the bottom 90%, or over 133 million families, just 4% of the nation’s wealth.
  • In 2015, the top 1 percent of families in the United States made more than 25 times what families in the bottom 99 percent did, according to a paper from the Economic Policy Institute.
  • The top 1 percent of families took home an average of 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent in 2015, according to a new paper released by the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. This has increased since 2013, showing that income inequality has risen in nearly every state.
  • The top 1 percent of families took home an average of 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent in 2015, according to a new paper released by the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. This has increased since 2013, showing that income inequality has risen in nearly every state.
  • This trend is a reversal of what happened in the United States in the years during and after the Great Depression. From 1928 until 1973, the share of income held by the top 1 percent declined in nearly every state.
  • The amount of money  that was given out in bonuses on Wall Street last year is twice the amount workers earned in the country combined.
  • The wealthiest 85 people on the planet have more money that the poorest 3.5 billion people combined
  • Since 1990, CEO compensation has increased by 300%. Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle Corp. received US$1.84-billion and Barry Diller, chief executive of Interactive/Expedia.com received US$1.14-billion, and the next six received at least US$500-million in total pay. The average pay of chief executives at major corporations in the United States was US$15.7million in 2018.
  • Corporate profits have doubled. The average worker’s salary has increased 4%. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage has actually decreased.
  • In a study  of 34 developed countries, the United States had the second highest level of income inequality, ahead of only Chile.
  • Some hedge fund mangers made $4 billion annually, enough to pay the salaries of every public school teacher in New York City.

The World Inequality Database essential. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Paris, the WID is funded by the Paris School of Economics, the Ford Foundation and numerous other grant-making government research agencies and nonprofit foundations in Europe and the U.S. Its executive committee includes three of our leading experts on economic inequality, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of UC Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.

 

 

The WID relies on a vast store of data from government accounts, household surveys and tax data, among other categories. In its latest report, the database reduces this material to a series of graphs showing the history of inequality and its possible future — or futures, dependent as they are on government policy choices.

Its findings are that “economic inequality is widespread and to some extent inevitable,” but that the scale of inequality as it has evolved in many countries is not inevitable. More important is the implication of the existing trends: “If rising inequality is not properly monitored and addressed,” the report says, “it can lead to various sorts of political, economic, and social catastrophes.”

 

Let’s start with our most immediate concern, the rising income and wealth inequality in the United States. The rise of the 1% has been especially notable in the U.S. not merely because of this cohort’s share of national wealth, but because it shows the abandonment of American principles of egalitarian economic opportunities.

The share of national income going to the top 1% in the U.S. has risen from just over 10% in 1980 to more than 20% in 2016. Meanwhile, the share collected by the bottom 50% has fallen from more than 20% to about 13%.

What may be most remarkable about this trend is how sharply it diverges from conditions in the region that most resembles the U.S. in terms of economic principles, Western Europe. The 1% commanded about 10% of national income in Europe in 1980, about the same as its share in the U.S. But its share rose only to about 12% in 2016, compared with 20% in the U.S.

 

 

Consequently, the bottom 50% in Western Europe still possess a larger share of national income than the top 1%, the reverse of the situation in the United States. The bottom 50% still own a larger share of national income than the 1% in Western Europe. (WID). Globally, the prosperity of the top echelons feeds upon itself, forcing stagnation on income groups below them. The result is the “elephant curve” of global inequality, so named because it resembles the profile of a trumpeting pachyderm.

The top 1% have captured twice as much growth as the bottom 50% since 1980. “Income growth has been sluggish or even zero for individuals with incomes between the global bottom 50% and top 1% groups,” the report says. The wealth of the top 1% begets more wealth, at the expense of everyone else. Even the poorest of the 1% — those with incomes between percentiles 99 and 99.1 — saw income growth of 74% from 1980 to 2016. (WID)

An oft-overlooked phenomenon that both reflects and contributes to rising inequality is the decline of public capital in the developed world, especially when compared to the growth of private capital. The trend hamstrings government efforts to address economic inequality by impoverishing programs that would give middle- and low-income citizens help climbing the economic ladder, such as public education.

“Since 1980, very large transfers of public to private wealth occurred in nearly all countries, whether rich or emerging,” the WID reports. “While national wealth has substantially increased, public wealth is now negative or close to zero in rich countries.”

Those include the United States, where public capital has fallen to a negative figure. That’s because public capital is defined as public assets minus public debt. The U.S. has borrowed heavily for purposes that include funding tax cuts for the wealthy.

That’s effectively a transfer of wealth from the public to rich private individuals, and it’s likely to intensify in coming years, as the country borrows to fund the $1.5-trillion tax cut enacted in December to benefit corporations and the rich. Republicans in Congress already are talking about the need to cut back on programs that benefit the middle and working classes, such as Social Security and Medicare, because the nation “can’t afford” them. That would be a further draining of wealth from lower-income Americans to the 1%.

Current trends point to even more inequality in the offing. At existing rates, the wealth share of the top 0.1% will match the share of the entire global wealth middle class by 2050.

At current rates, the share of wealth held by the top 0.1% will match that of the middle 40% by 2050. The wealth of the top 1% will easily outdistance the middle class. (WID)

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Countries have a choice — whether to continue their current trends, which would mean increasing inequality, follow the U.S. model, which would increase inequality even more, or follow the European Union trend line, which would narrow the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 50%.

Following the U.S. trend would lead to devastating levels of inequality; following national trends would make things worse though not as much; and following the EU’s trend line since 1980 would begin to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

 

 

The choices are easy to identify, but increasingly difficult to implement as the 1% grow more politically powerful. Among the keys to reducing economic inequality are progressive tax systems, inheritance taxes and public investment in education, health and the environment.

In recent years, all three have moved in the wrong direction in the U.S. Tax progressivity has been sharply reduced, most recently with the tax cuts last December. Inheritance taxes also have been reduced. Public education in the K-12 and university levels is being stifled, and the one initiative aimed at improving health, the Affordable Care Act, has been under constant attack from conservatives fronting for the wealthy. The Trump administration has been pursuing a focused campaign to dismantle environmental protections.

These charts reveal how these trends have resulted in inequality and betoken even more in the future. What choices will be made in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world in years to come?

Dominic Barton, Managing Director of McKinsey and Co., argues “ Few would disagree that unchecked increases in inequality will be costly for capitalism in the long-run–due to the divisions that it creates within society and the strain that it puts on social safety nets.”

 

 

The Pew Foundation study, reported in the New York Times , concluded, “The chance that children of the poor or middle class will climb up the income ladder, has not changed significantly over the last three decades.” The Economist’s special report, Inequality in America, concluded, “The fruits of productivity gains have been skewed towards the highest earners and towards companies whose profits have reached record levels as a share of GDP.”

A joint effort by the Russell Sage Foundation,  the Carnegie Corporation and the Lyle Spencer Foundation has released several reports based on research on the issue of income inequality. They have concluded that over the past three decades, the U.S. has experienced a slow rise in economic inequality and as a result, the fruits of economic growth have gone largely to the wealthy; median incomes have stagnated; and the poor have increasingly been left behind.

In their book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made The Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back On The Middle Class , Jacob Hacker and Paul Pearson argue that since the late 1970’s, an intense campaign of anti-democracy policy changes have resulted in an intense concentration of wealth and income to the very few individuals and corporations in the U.S.

According to Richard Wolff , professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, U.S. corporations, particularly the large ones, “have avoided taxes as effectively as they have controlled government expenditures to benefit them.” Wolff points out that during the Depression and WWII, federal income tax receipts from individuals and corporations were fairly equal, but by 1980, individual income taxes were four times higher than corporate taxes. “Since WWII, corporations have shifted much of the federal tax burden for themselves to the public-and especially onto the middle class,” Wolff says.

 

 

The most comprehensive recent study of corporate taxes by professors at Duke, MIT and the University of California concluded “we find a significant percent of firms that appear to be successfully avoiding large portions of the corporate income over a sustained period of time.” For example, The New York Times reported that GE’s total tax was 14.3% over the last 5 years, while in 2009 receiving a $140 billion bailout guarantee of its debt from the federal government.

The world is awash in personal wealth: $153.2 trillion in total, according to Allianz’s new Global Wealth Report 2015. That’s enough to pay three times the world’s sovereign debt, the debts of each nation. The report, which measured 2014 wealth, found 2014 was the third consecutive year in which global wealth grew more than 7%.

The jump was largely the result of households pumping up their personal savings efforts. The U.S.—with $63.5 trillion in total private wealth—holds the largest amount of any country in the world. But that wealth is unevenly distributed, and nowhere is that more evident than in the U.S., which also has the largest wealth inequality gap of 55 countries studied, according to the report. While America’s growing income inequality has been the source of much debate, this report examined the wealth—which includes not just salary, but also property and investments held by a family. The report found that America’s wealth inequality is even more gaping its income inequality. In fact, the report dubbed the U.S. the “Unequal States of America” due to the size of the gap.

What happens to societies where there are large and growing gaps in wealth? Significant social problems, and declining indicators of well being and happiness, recent research seems to suggest.

British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, argue that almost every indicator of social health in wealthy societies is related to its level of economic equality. The authors, using data from the U.S. and other developed nations, contend that GDP and overall wealth are less significant that the gap between the rich and the poor, which is the worst in the U.S. among developed nations. “In more unequal societies, people are more out for themselves, their involvement in community life drops away, “Wilkinson says. If you live in a state or country where level of income is more equal, “you will be less likely to have mental illness and other social problems,” he argues.

 

 

A University of Leicester psychologist, Adrian White, has produced the first ever “world map of happiness,” based on over 100 studies of more than 80,000 people and by analyzing data from the CIA, UNESCO, The New Economics Foundation, the World Health Organization and European databases. The well being index that was produced was based on the prediction variables of health, wealth and education. According to this study, Denmark was ranked first, Switzerland second, Canada 10th and the U.S. 23rd.

Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, authors of The Trouble with Billionaires, argue that increasing poverty due to economic inequality in the U.S. and Canada has detrimental effects on health and social conditions and undermines democracy. They cite the fact that while the U.S. has the most billionaires in the world; it ranks poorly in the Western world in terms of infant mortality, life expectancy, crime levels-particularly violent crime-and electoral participation.

Between 1983 and 1999, men’s life expectancy decreased in more than 50 U.S. counties, according to a study by Majid Ezzati, associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health. For women, the news was even worse: life expectancy decreased in more than 900 counties-more than a quarter of the total. The United States no longer boasts anywhere near the world’s longest life expectancy. It doesn’t even make the top 40. In this and many other ways, the richest nation on earth is not the healthiest.

Ezzati’s results are one example. There is also evidence that living in a society with wide disparities-in health, in wealth, in education-is worse for all the society’s members, even the well off. Life-expectancy statistics hint at this. People at the top of the U.S. income spectrum “live a very long time,” says Lisa Berkman, Director of Harvard University’s Center Population and Development Studies, “but people at the top in some other countries live a lot longer.”

A meta-analysis published by the British Medical Journal shows a link between income inequality and mortality and health. The researchers concluded that people living in regions with high-income inequality had an increased risk of premature death, independent of their individual socioeconomic status, age or gender. While it is logical to assume the lowest income citizens would be at grater health risk, the study concluded that income inequality is “detrimental to the more affluent members of society, since these citizens experience psychosocial stress from the inequality and loss of social cohesion.”

Often popular media portrays the image of everyone favoring and wanting to be wealthy, but that may be deceiving.

Recent neuroscience search reveals that the brain rejects inequality and prefers equitable balance-physiological, emotional, social and psychological. E. Tricomi and colleagues advanced this argument, published in the journal, Nature. They contend the human brain dislikes inequality when it comes to money. And other behavioral and anthropological evidence shows that humans dislike social inequality and unfair distribution of outcomes. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and Trinity College in Ireland have identified reward centers in the brain that are sensitive to inequality. This research shows a dislike of fairness and inequality is more than just a social convention. On a physiological level, people may not be as selfish as once believed. Other studies have shown that many wealthy people want to restore equality and balance by charitable donations to assuage their guilt and decrease their own discomfort over having more than other people.

Research indicates that high inequality reverberates through societies on multiple levels, correlating with, if not causing, more crime, less happiness, poorer mental and physical health, less racial harmony, and less civic and political participation. Tax policy and social-welfare programs, then, take on importance far beyond determining how much income people hold onto.

In their report, Building A Better America–One Wealth Quintile At A Time , Dan Ariely of Duke University and Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School, showed that across ideological, economic and gender groups, Americans thought the richest 20% of American society controlled about 59% of the country’s wealth, while the real number is actually 84%. At the same time, the survey respondents believed that the top 20% should own only 32% of the wealth. In contrast, in Sweden, a country with significantly greater economic equality, 20% of the richest people there control only 36% of the wealth of the country. In the American survey, 92% of the respondents said they’d rather live in a country with Sweden’s wealth distribution. They concluded that a majority of Americans they surveyed “dramatically underestimated the current level of inequality,” and “respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable even than their immensely low estimates of the actual distribution.” They contend that all demographic groups including conservatives like Republicans and the wealthy “desired more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.”

Frederick Soft, writing in the American Journal of Political Science provides an analysis of economic inequality and democratic political engagement, concluding “higher levels of income inequality powerfully depress political interest, the frequency of political discussion and participation in elections among all but the most affluent citizens, providing compelling evidence that greater economic inequality yields greeter political inequality.”

So while income inequality is a growing serious problem for the economic and social health of the U.S. population, it’s fair to say it’s also a threat to its democratic system.

Research indicates that high inequality reverberates through societies on multiple levels, correlating with, if not causing, more crime, less happiness, poorer mental and physical health, less racial harmony, and less civic and political participation. Tax policy and social-welfare programs, then, take on importance far beyond determining how much income people hold onto. The level of inequality we allow represents our answer to “a very important question,” says Nancy Krieger, professor of society, human development, and health at Harvard “Whatkind of society do we want to live in?”

Reasons For Wanting Equality

First, inequality with respect to income and wealth undercuts equality of opportunity, which depends heavily on access to education. Poor people tend to have much worse access to educational resources, because they live in worse neighborhoods with worse schools. One of the reasons that the United States has less upward social mobility than other wealthy countries is that university education is much more expensive. So even with respect to what is supposedly a narrow right to equality of opportunity, income inequality is a serious concern. Second, equality before the law is severely challenged when people do not have access to good legal representation.

Wealthy people can hire expensive lawyers to ensure that they are more likely to benefit than lose when dealing with the legal system. Third, people need good health in order to function fully as human beings, and the negative impact of inequality on health has been well documented. The impact of inequality is partly that poor people often cannot afford medical treatments. In addition, people who are low in social hierarchies tend to have less control over their lives, which leads to more stress and resulting diseases and unhealthy behaviors. Fourth, inequality leads to bad social effects such as increased crime, lack of social cohesion, and lack of trust.

 

 

Numerous international comparisons find a strong correlation between equality and positive aspects of society such as happiness and human development. Inequality between countries contributes to illegal immigration, which is stressful both for the immigrants and for citizens whose precarious financial states are threatened by low-price immigrant labor.

The need for relatedness concerns feeling socially connected, including belonging to a social group, being cared for by others, and being treated as significant. Relatedness supports rights concerning being able to associate with various groups and being taken seriously rather than suffer discrimination because of sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Lack of money can diminish satisfaction of the need for relatedness, when it leads to stresses on individuals that make sustenance of good relationships difficult. For example, families suffer when parents lack sufficient income to look after their themselves and their children.

The third basic need is competence, which covers people’s needs to feel effectiveness, mastery, and effective operation within their important life contexts. People need to be able to strive and achieve. Competence is thwarted when challenges are too difficult or when feelings of mastery are diminished by excessive criticism. If people are unequal with respect to the satisfaction of the basic need for competence, then they cannot develop fully as human beings. Rigid social hierarchies in income and wealth make people highly insecure in their work relationships, preventing them from gaining the benefits of the achievements that signal competence. When inequality leads to substantial unemployment, people suffer from both the lack of money and the lack of work achievement.

“Income inequality is a public health concern,” says Hui Zheng, author of the study and assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University. His study appears online in the journal Social Science and Medicine . Many other studies have examined the impact of income inequality on mortality and have come up with mixed results, according to Zheng. But he thinks that this study overcomes problems in previous research by using a different data structure and statistical model (called a discrete-time hazard model). These results also support findings from a 2009 study by Zheng that examined how income inequality affected Americans’ self-rated health. That study found that the dramatic increase in income inequality from 1972 to 2004 increased the odds of worse self-rated health by 9.4 percent. That study only looked at the instantaneous impact on self-rated health. The impact should be even larger if it had taken into account the long term impact, he said. “The evidence is growing clearer that income inequality has a long-term detrimental impact on individual health and mortality,” he said.

Surveys show that the more the income inequality in a given area, the less the members of that area trust each other. Related survey work shows people in communities with higher levels of inequality are more likely to think that their system is unfair and that those who are getting ahead are doing so underhandedly and that the less privileged are more envious of the more privileged in times of higher inequality. Experimental work, which manipulates relative monetary disadvantage in the lab, finds largely the same results.

Inequality may also reduce trust through more structural mechanisms. In more unequal countries, people from different social classes are less likely to interact with each other: they are more likely to live in different neighborhoods, send their children to different schools, read different newspapers; generally, they experience radically different social  worlds. If people do not commingle with individuals from other social classes, they might be more likely to think of other groups as outgroups, leading them to essentialize class differences. Indeed, in more unequal societies, residents have stronger class identification, with the poor more likely to self‐identify as “lower class” , or as “have nots”. Among people living in U.S. states with higher income inequality or among people experimentally led to perceive that income inequality in their state was high, the rich were less likely to give to charity, perhaps because they have internalized or even biologized the differences between themselves and the poor. In more equal societies, the increased points of social overlap can lead to a sense of shared social fate, which can lead to higher generalized societal trust, and without the social overlap.

Among America’s most cherished core values is the belief that the United States is a “land of opportunity” and that we uniquely offer to citizens the potential for rising from “rags to riches” provided that citizens have the necessary ability and work hard. This is a myth. Income and wealth disparity in the United States (as measured by the Gini index of equality/inequality, and in other ways) is much higher in the United States than in any other large First World democracy. So is hereditary socioeconomic immobility, that is, the probability that a son’s relative income will just mirror his father’s relative income, and that sons of poor fathers will not become wealthy. Part of the reason for those depressing facts is inequality of educational opportunities. Children of rich Americans tend to receive much better educations than children of poor Americans.

The higher the level of inequality in a society, the more unhappy residents are. Inequality may be the answer to the famous Easterlin Paradox, which asks why economic growth does not always translate to the increased happiness of residents. Oishi & Kesebir show that in low‐inequality countries, residents are indeed happier when the economy is growing, as Easterlin had originally predicted. However, in higher inequality countries, growth does not correlate as strongly with happiness, and, in a set of high‐inequality Central and South American countries, residents become unhappier as their economy grows. When economic growth is relatively evenly shared, the Easterlin Paradox tends to disappear; it is only when the gains go disproportionately to a small fragment of the population that growth does not lead to nation‐level increases in happiness.

 

Summary:

 

There are dangerous signs that rising inequality could threaten the stability of political systems of nations and undermine their ability to address our shared challenges. The focus now quickly needs to turn to ensuring that we build more inclusive societies at home and abroad.

Among the urgent actions required to reverse inequality are the introduction of more progressive systems of taxation and redistribution and closure of tax havens that allow individuals and companies to avoid their responsibilities to societies. Investments in health, education and infrastructure in deprived areas are particularly vital, as are investments in affordable housing and other measures to increase mobility, allowing individuals to move to dynamic centres which offer jobs and higher incomes.

The short-term impact of the pandemic requires unprecedented measures to support the growing numbers of unemployed, with record low interest rates allowing this to be funded by debt. Most developing countries cannot create more debt, and so much greater levels of international solidarity are needed to assist these countries, including through the writing off of their debt, increases in aid, and ensuring that the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other development institutions are able to meet the needs of this poverty and inequality reduction challenge.

Clearly, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a country with severe income inequality, amassing the majority of wealth in its economy, while the poor and middle class are suffering from a declining standard of living. The impact of this inequality goes far beyond traditional financial measurements and can be seen in deteriorating health and well being of more and more Americans. The cumulative trend will also clearly pose threat to democratic institutions and norms.

Copyright: Neither this article or a portion thereof may be reproduced in any print or media format without the express permission of the author.