Income inequalities
Goffman, Ethan
Income inequality in the United States is growing with alarming speed. The biggest beneficiaries of this trend are those who least need it, the super-rich, while the most severe victims are...
...A wall is forming between the richest and poorest Americans...
...Big business now controls the ultimate union-busting tool...
...The upper 20 percent of family incomes in 1987 stood at 43.7 percent of national income, while the lowest 20 percent took in only 4.6 percent, down from 5.5 percent in 1973...
...By contrast, senior citizens, by forming powerful lobbying organizations, have seen their poverty rate sliced in half in the last decade...
...The barrier stems from social, cultural and racial factors but, most of all, from economic and educational status...
...Separated from the majority, able to whisk around the world electronically on satellite waves or physically on jet planes, they work together to maintain their status...
...The average total compensation for the chief executive of a large company was over $2 million, while top salaries stood at $40 or 50 million (what can anyone do with all that money...
...First, the government's level of financial support for poor families does matter...
...In the new economy, "symbolic analysis" workers find themselves in great demand-a top-flight management consultant can auction his (or, much more rarely, her) skills to the highest bidder among a variety of countries and companies...
...It is the youngest in these families who suffer most: poverty among children stands at 20.6 percent compared to 17.6 percent in 1966...
...For the growing underclass, prospects for the future are bleak...
...On paper this puts the United States, with its university system, in a more than comfortable position...
...The very richest Americans were rewarded even more generously...
...With record speed, a company can relocate a plant from a country with high wages or labor problems to one where desperate people are only too willing to accept a job at any wage...
...Large companies feel no loyalty to a single country...
...Our decision-makingclasses have more in common with their peers abroad than with other Americans...
...Canada, which spends 1.6 percent of its GNP on income support for children, doesn't have the kind of poverty found in the United States, which spends only .6 percent of GNP on such programs...
...The world economy is increasingly international and mobile...
...Timothy Smeedling of Vanderbilt University gives two main reasons for the increase in poverty despite a rising GNP...
...Second, the increasing divorce rate, combined with shrinking unemployment and other benefits, hurts the neediest families most...
...Reichdivides the workforceinto "symbolic analysis" people, whose work involves thinking, planning, and creativity, and routine production and personal service employment, involving unthinking repetition of a few basic actions...
...Yet this advantage holds only to those who can afford these universities...
...rather, 8· DISSENT "a company with headquartersin the United States, production facilities in Taiwan, and a marketing force spread out across many nations competes with a similarly ecumenical company...
...Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards, written in 1929, envisions a world where one huge corporation dominates society, in which all citizens are employed by that corporation, which takes care of its workers, bringing about a Utopia...
...As Leonard Silk: reports in the New York Times (May 12, 1989), the 1987 total compensation "for the average chief executive of a big company was 93 times the average pay of a factory worker," compared to 41 times in 1960...
...By contrast, the internationalization of corporations now seems more likely to bring about the world portrayed in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, where the privileged few enjoy luxuries provided by a population toiling underground who never see the sun...
...The biggest beneficiaries of this trend are those who least need it, the super-rich, while the most severe victims are those who can least afford it, children...
...Rising income inequality, though, has an even more profound cause than those cited above, according to Robert Reich writing in the New Republic (May 1, 1989...
...And the impoverished families struggling to raise these children also lack a political voice...
...Children, of course, are unable to speak up for themselves or to lobby politicians...
...Reich argues that "as our economic fates diverge, the top fifth may be losing the sense of connectedness with the bottom fifth...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
