Significance of Inequality
Among economists and related experts, most agree that America's growing income inequality is "deeply worrying", unjust, a danger to democracy/social stability, or a sign of national decline. Concern extends even to such supporters (or former supporters) of laissez-faire economics and private sector financiers.
Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, has stated reference to growing inequality: "This is not the type of thing which a democratic society — a capitalist democratic society — can really accept without addressing." Some economists (David Moss, Paul Krugman) believe the "Great Divergence" may be connected to the financial crisis of 2008. Money manager William H. Gross, managing director of PIMCO, criticized the shift in distribution of income from labor to capital that underlies some of the growth in inequality as unsustainable, saying:
"Even conservatives must acknowledge that return on capital investment, and the liquid stocks and bonds that mimic it, are ultimately dependent on returns to labor in the form of jobs and real wage gains. If Main Street is unemployed and undercompensated, capital can only travel so far down Prosperity Road."
He concluded: "Investors/policymakers of the world wake up – you’re killing the proletariat goose that lays your golden eggs."
On the other side of the issue are those who have claimed that the increase is not significant, that it doesn't matter because America's economic growth and/or equality of opportunity are what's important, that it is a global phenomenon which would be foolish to try to change through US domestic policy, that it "has many economic benefits and is the result of ... a well-functioning economy", and has or may become an excuse for "class-warfare rhetoric", and may lead to policies that "reduce the well-being of wealthier individuals".
Read more about this topic: Income Inequality In The United States
Famous quotes containing the words significance of, significance and/or inequality:
“It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)