One Percent or 33: America’s Real Inequality Problem
Review of Mitch Pearlstein’s From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation (ISI, Aug 2011) ISBN: 978- 1607093626. Paperback, 165 pages; $24.95.
The American economy remains sluggish and, from all over the political spectrum, particularly the left, people have turned their attention to inequality. The Occupy Wall Street movement, though without actual plans for reform, emphasizes the growing inequality between the top one percent and the 99 percent of Americans below them, with the implication that income growth among top earners means less for everybody else. Supporting this line of thinking, the New York Times published an article in early November titled, “The Rich Get Richer,” which somewhat misleadingly implied that the rich were indeed getting richer, even through the last three years, while the poor were getting poorer. Michael Medved, among other commentators, pointed out that, buried in the story, a study by the Congressional Budget Office was mentioned showing that from 1980- 2007 the richest Americans were indeed getting richer by leaps and bounds; by progressively smaller leaps, so were the middle class and low income earners. Not to mention the fact that there was a great deal of mobility between classes. In any case, the top one percent lost the most money in terms of absolute dollars after the 2008 financial meltdown.
But if the Occupiers were right about one thing, it was that there is a growing inequality in American life. Scott Winship, relying on the findings of the Pew Charitable Trust’s Economic Mobility Project as evaluated by his colleagues at the centerleft Brookings Institution, shows that though the gains have not been as startling in the last few decades as they were for Americans 40 years back, what has been evident is indeed “pervasive economic mobility.” Pervasive indeed, from downward mobility from the top and middle to upward mobility from the middle. The exception, he notes, is “upward mobility from the bottom.”
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