Gateway to
Sources and Information About Income Inequality in the United States
Millions
of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, and yet almost all of
the new income and wealth being created is going to the top one percent. While
the top one percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past
decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall.
Scholars, from the Nobel-Prize-winning Paul Krugman to
the widely respected economist James Surowiecki, have been working to analyze
these disparities. Americans are not generally aware of the extent of this
income inequality. In most developed countries, there is a direct relationship
between income inequality and the public's views about the need to address the
issue – but not in America, where income inequality is worse but the concern is
lower. The most commonly accepted measurement of income inequality, the Gini
Index, ranks the United States sixth-worst among 173 nations.
Private-equity
companies are far more obviously connected to an undue concentration of wealth
at the expense of workers and communities than are collateralized-debt
obligations, which were at the core of our 2008 Great Recession. Within the one
percent, there is a top one percent that consists disproportionately of
private-equity and hedge-fund principals.
Anyone
wanting to know about income inequality may scroll down the various dates of
the archive file, or use Windows Command f to find specific names or topics
throughout the archive.