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The debate about the growth in income inequality in the United States was framed by Occupy Wall Street as the gap between the top 1% and the 99% of Americans in the majority. New research shows that the share at of the wealth has increasingly been concentrated in the hands of a much small group, “the plutocrats.”
Slate’s Jordan Weissman explains:
But they are basically in keeping with what has already been shown about income inequality. Occupy Wall Street trained Americans to frame the economic gap in terms of the 99 percent and 1 percent. But writers and economists have been pointing out for years that the biggest winners in today’s globalized, finance-heavy economy have been an even smaller band of super-rich. Tim Noah dubbed them “the stinking rich.”Chrystia Freeland went with “plutocrats.” No matter what you choose to name them, the largest economic gains have accrued to Americans at the very, very tiniest tip of the earnings pyramid. Here’s one dramatic illustration I’ve drawn from the World Top Incomes Database. The top 0.5 percent, with minimum household income of $551,000, have roughly tripled their share of the nation’s paycheck since 1978, to about 18 percent. The bottom half of the 1 percent, the work-a-day rich, have upped theirs only to around 4 percent.
Are American kids stripped of their independence, denied the chance to take risks, and unable to make discoveries on their own? The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin argues that’s the case–and we’re not even making kids safer in the process:
It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting. One very thorough study of “children’s independent mobility,” conducted in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower. When you ask parents why they are more protective than their parents were, they might answer that the world is more dangerous than it was when they were growing up. But this isn’t true, or at least not in the way that we think.the
