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Income Inequality in the United States

nearly synonymous with minority groups, especially blacks, living in urban slums, and on whom little public sympathy is expended. Instead, the attention at least among the politically shrewd is on "the working poor," or "working Americans," or some other such expression: all are ways of speaking of the working class while avoiding any hint of Marxist connotation.

If the last decade has been characterized by public fascination with the rich, it has also been characterized by public anxiety about the working class. "The good jobs" -- factory work that paid well in proportion to the education and skills required -- are said to have vanished or been moved overseas, and been replaced by low-paid work in fast-food restaurants, our cultural symbol of the low-skilled service sector. Anxiety has spread upward from the working class to the middle class; as companies downsize, a process which in the early 90s reached far into middle management, a sense has grown of economic polarization, an alarming picture of a future economy divided between well-to-do software engineers and struggling, ultimately hopeless burger-flippers.

Whether all this has actually happened, and if so why and to what degree, are questions addressed in the remainder of this essay. In the main, they are questions of economics, and specifically of macroeconomics: the concern here is not with individual firms and their hiring or salary decisions, but with the aggregate effects of such decisions on the economy as a whole (which in turn shape the assumptions made by individual firms). Therefore, this essay is primarily about macroeconomics.

However, it is also necessarily about politics and ultimately about social morality. Economists are on the whole reluctant to admit politics, much less morality, into their discussions. On the one hand, these things are ill-suited to modeling: who can draw supply and demand curves for social justice, or even clearly define i...

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Income Inequality in the United States. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:20, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1691000.html