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his or her own talent and industry. But if youre poor, if youre
uneducated, if youre black, if youre Hispanic, if youre a woman, there
often is no fair start.
Inequality, of course, has become a national buzzword and a
political cause clbrein this election year. Its been discussed everywhere
in the recent past, from the State of the Union Address to Thomas
Pikettys best-seller to the lips of presidential candidates to Pope Franciss
encyclical Laudato Si.
Though the American public and politicians have just rediscovered the
problem of inequality, the issue has long been an area of academic inquiry
at Harvard, where research on its root causes crosses numerous
disciplines.
Inequality in America has been on the rise in recent years, after dipping
by some measures following the Gilded Age and the Great Depression. It
was a reality when Harvard philosopher John Rawls wrote his seminal
text, A Theory of Justice, in 1971. It was a reality when now-Harvard
Kennedy School (HKS) lecturer Marshall Ganz organized farm workers in
the Southwest in the 1960s and 70s. It was a reality when Nancy Oriol,
now dean for students at Harvard Medical School(HMS), founded the
Family Van care program in 1992. It was a reality
whenGovernment Professor Jennifer Hochschild wrote Facing Up to the
American Dream in 1995, and when other faculty members penned
books and articles on the problems many facets. And it was an expanding
reality in 2011, when HBS Professor Michael Norton published that
rectangular graph, in a study that also showed that Americans really dont
know how unequal the United States is and that, given a blind choice,
theyd rather live in Sweden, thank you very much.
A blizzard of statistics illustrates the problem and, with each monthly
release from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or any
number of think tanks, the pile of reports grows higher. Their by-nowfamiliar theme is that the rich have gotten richer dramatically so in
recent decades, while the poor have gotten poorer. And the middle class
has just been hanging on.
The details show that real wages for most U.S. workers have been
relatively stagnant since the 1970s, while those for the top 1 percent have
increased 156 percent, and those for the top 0.1 percent have increased
362 percent, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.
Those trends resulted in the poorest 20 percent of Americans receiving
just 3.6 percent of the national income in 2014, down from 5.7 percent in
1974. The upper 20 percent, meanwhile, received nearly half of U.S.
income in 2014, up from about 40 percent in 1974, according to Census
Bureau statistics.
But some analysts, such as Hochschild and Piketty, the French economist,
say the area of greatest concern is overall wealth, not income alone.
From a poverty perspective, income means a lot making $15,000
versus $20,000, said Hochschild, who directs the HKSbased Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy. But
from an inequality perspective writ large its about wealth. As a
60s kid, I care a whole lot about ownership of the means of productivity.
In his 2013 best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty
argues that wealth is critically important because capital grows faster than
the economy. That means that those who hold capital assets like
money, stocks, real estate will see their wealth grow faster than those
managing on wages alone. Over time, that concentrates societys wealth
into fewer hands.
America today appears to illustrate this process in action. Though the
wealthiest 20 percent earned nearly half of all wages in 2014, they have
more than 80 percent of the wealth. The wealth of the poorest 20 percent,
as measured by net worth, is actually negative. If they sell all they own,
theyll still be in debt.
referrals to the nearby neglected neighborhoods. But the van staff quickly
learned that infant mortality wasnt the only problem.
Infant mortality was simply a sign of a community in distress, Oriol
said. The issue was poverty and what I call being medically
disenfranchised. It was all the issues of life. It was homelessness, it was
not having a job just everything.
Over at Harvard Divinity School, Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, is
examining the issue from a moral standpoint. He said societys economic
fruits born most recently on a wave of automation and technical
sophistication make it possible to improve the lives of the poor beyond
what was possible previously.
One way to do that, he said, would be to guarantee all citizens a minimum
income. This would free millions from what can become wage slavery,
he said, and allow people to follow passions and creative urges. McKanan
acknowledged that such a scheme which might be accomplished by
expanding Social Security is politically unlikely, but said it is the role of
academics to think deeply about how to create a more moral and just
society that works better.
Though the resultant redistribution of wealth represented by McKanans
idea would be too extreme for many Americans, Nortons survey work on
the topic does show that Americans want a more equal society than exists
now.
A surprising central finding of Nortons research is that we really dont
know how unequal the United States is. In a 2011 study, conducted with
Duke Universitys Dan Ariely, Americans consistently underestimated just
how unequal the nation is and said their preferred wealth distribution
while preserving some inequality is more leveling than their inaccurate
understanding of the current state of affairs.
Actual U.S. wealth distribution plotted against estimated and ideal distributions.
Source: Building a Better America
We had the perhaps nave idea that we could show people the reality, and
their attitudes and behavior would change, Norton said. But Im a
Educational attainment refers to the highest level of education that an individual has
completed. Source: Census. Graphic by Judy Blomquist/Harvard Staff
That story is mirrored in higher education, with some gains but persistent
gaps. The proportion of associates, bachelors, masters, and doctorate
degrees awarded to blacks and Hispanics all increased, though progress
slowed the higher the degree, according to the National Center for
Education Statistics. In the 2009-10 academic year, blacks earned 14
percent of all associates degrees, on a par with their 13.2 percent
representation in the population. But they earned only 10 percent of
bachelors degrees, 12 percent of masters, and 7.4 percent of doctorates.
Those figures also mask the fact that while black women have progressed
and earn disproportionately more of those degrees, the gaps for black men
have been slower to close, according to a 2012 report from the National
Center for Education Statistics.
At the same time, black men are overrepresented in U.S. jails, according
to a 2014 report by the U.S. Department of Justice. At a time when
society, in the wake of racial flare-ups in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere,
has been questioning just how evenhanded its law enforcement practices
are, African-American men make up 37 percent of the prison population,
compared with 32 percent white and 22 percent Hispanic. In the general
population, blacks make up 13 percent, whites 62 percent, and Hispanics
17.
have shown that government is more responsive to those at the top of the
socioeconomic ladder.
In the end, Fung said, Preserving the integrity of our democracy may be
the most important reason to address poverty and inequality.
Gazette staff writers Colleen Walsh, Christina Pazzanese, and Corydon
Ireland contributed to this report.
Illustration by Kathleen M.G. Howlett.
Next Tuesday: political and economic inequality