Talk:Wealth inequality in the United States/Archive 1

Archive 1

Crime

Could you add some info about the connection between wealth inequality and crime? One good example is Lyle and Erik Menendez who killed their parents to get their inheritance. Can you add a link under "See also" for them? Stars4change (talk) 02:39, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Politics

many dimensions are missing from this article - wealth is also tied to lower tax rates on wealth and political influence. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.16.3.247 (talk) 23:04, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Culture

I would love to see some discussion of class mobility. Some are born into the bottom quintile, but end up in the top quintile. My uncle says "Poor people have poor ways." By that he means that people who grow up poor, have life habits that increase the probability that they stay poor. A. Luxury vices (cigarettes and alcohol) B. False investments (The Lottery, and gambling in general Dashro (talk) 14:53, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

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The following was written by an individual who was concerned that the writer or writers of the article "Wealth inequality in the United States" might harbor some bias in favor of redressing such inequality. This commentator does not dispute the facts presented, but appears to dislike the original author(s) semantical choices. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.127.228.83 (talk) 03:35, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Gender

I've been looking for somewhere that shows the difference (inequality?) in wealth between genders. Perhaps this isn't the right page, though the title (other than the political usage to which it gets used) might imply that such data belongs here. However, I don't see it anywhere on Wikipedia. 84.93.173.54 (talk) 01:43, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Effect of wealth inequality

There is a section on the causes of inequality, but not on the effects. This would be valuable information.72.187.99.79 (talk) 17:22, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

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Situation even got worse between 2007/08 and 2012/13 or?

just a non-professional question, for the 2nd graphic the effects of the crisis would be extreme important or? Over 15 Percent of the population are receiving "food stamps" I know today there are no stamps, you get a digit card, and you get money on that account, maybe once or twice or even up to 4 times a month. It is not much, but for the really poorest americans it is,

September 2012 47,710,283 people in 22,973,657 households were receiving 6,407,019,993 US-$, 134.29$ each person and 278.89$ each household. It was the last month in the Fiscal Year 2012, which as a whole gave support to an (average) of 46,609,072 people in 22,329,713 households and did cost 74,620,790,688 US-$ (almost 75 billion) for an monthly average of 133.42$ or 278.48$ in a household. The disaster assistance which earlier was listed there is now seperated, but this is like Medicare/Medicaid one of the few larger budget items which really help. I don't know what you pay for food in the states and it will be very different from southwest California to the northwest parts of Washington compared with the Eastcost and Maine as the most northern part of the "Lower 48" I Think, but I heard it is cheaper than German average, Berlin is very cheap but south Germany (economic is much better there) is a bit more expensive, skandinavia is horrible expensive with ~13 US-$ for a pack of cigaretts and strict alcohol regulations, thats why scandinavians on travel to a football game or just for fun are so often drunken, here the booze is sooo cheap, 24/7 available for everyone.

The round graphic with bottom 40 per cent and so... this changed a lot during the crisis or? I mean for a short time, when the shares and stocks went down even the 0,1 % of the richest people in the world lost very big amounts. But soon the stocks recovered in most cases on the back of the normal population, because the Goverments all around the world gave financial guarantees with the taxes, money reserves and so on they had from 100 per cent of the population.

It is a big tragedy, and I hope Obama 2.0 will boost the US economy, this will help us all. The new income tax is a nice thing, but won't be enough, but he is also cutting military budget for the 2nd year in the row, if you add inflation it could be "real" 10 per cent. But at least the "2013 Military Pay Scale Chart - Effective January 1st, 2013 (Updated 01/07/2013)" was increased, like every year since at least 2006. Since the soldiers in most cases are no academics, it is good that they get a bit more money in times where I think even the congress and most politicians, state and local employees have to accept a wage freeze. But the army is now just reducing the number of active troops, we hope many of which who leave are old men and the others find another work, staying in the Reserve and maybe can join the army at a later time.

Just don't let buy China the companies, the buy first the smaller ones, and they pay much, but they have enough "green paper", if they want only 1 small tech they buy the whole company for billions, and if it don't run than and is making deficits they have to pay they close it quite quick or look for one of these companies that buys such companies and dissolve them with the most profit. If they start this in the U.S. its bad, they also buy everything with resources in Africa they can, to a much better Dollar prize anyone else can offer. Kilon22 (talk) 18:28, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Racial wealth gap and comparison with other countries

I think this should be added to this article: "over 25 years, the total wealth gap between white and African-American families nearly tripled, increasing from $85,000 in 1984 to $236,500 in 2009." - http://iasp.brandeis.edu/pdfs/Author/shapiro-thomas-m/racialwealthgapbrief.pdf EllenCT (talk) 05:26, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

See also: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/yes-us-wealth-inequality-is-terrible-by-global-standards/273908/ EllenCT (talk) 07:16, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

I added these. I also removed "Those who acquire a great deal of financial wealth do so primarily through the appreciation of fiscal portfolios. For this reason, financial wealth involves only stocks and mutual funds, and other investments. Hence, there is greater financial inequality than simple networth disparities." from the introduction because it wasn't cited, and directly contradicts the other portions of the article referring to home ownership, including the previous sentence. EllenCT (talk) 00:29, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

public domain video here

Nice public Domain Video here: [1] Victor Grigas (talk) 19:59, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Age & Household Size

This site points out that this article does not even once mention the ages of individuals. Also of interest and touched on in the link are the effects of household size, i.e. issues such as assortative mating and cohabitation versus marriage and their effects on wealth inequality,--2610:E0:A040:7EFD:754C:155B:1B77:F0BC (talk) 15:21, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Bible says "false balance"

I'd love to see you add that the Bible says in Proverbs 11:1 that "A false balance is abomination..." which means a false balance of anything in our lives, but especially wealth and work among all humans. Probably because if all people were "rich" that would help us all progress faster in all ways, like finding cures to diseases because every person would have the ability to share their experiments worldwide on the Internet until the pieces of the puzzle come together to equal a cure, etc. Stars4change (talk) 17:36, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

While I don't necessarily agree or disagree with your statement, I don't think it's accurate to state as a fact that Proverbs 11:1 "means" what you state it means. Taken literally, it's clear it's talking about corrupt market practices, but you are abstracting it further and applying it to wealth inequality in a way that, while perhaps having also this meaning, is highly speculative and opinionated (and subjective, not in the sense that the Bible is subjective, but in the sense that our interpretations of verses certainly can be). ComServant (talk) 08:01, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

In its simplest form wealth is dependent on income minus expenses over time. There needs to be some discussion of consumption here, as expenses greatly influence wealth. Suissecam (talk) 17:54, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Habitual splurging

Money is a good servant but a bad master. It's one of those things in life that if you don't try to control it, it can control you. Musicwriter (talk) 04:06, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

No pie charts!

Don't use pie charts for data with variable bin widths! That's a really poor visualization. The amounts of wealth and amounts of people are both unequally spaced. A histogram would work, similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Travel_time_histogram_total_n_Stata.png, or maybe show bars of the cumulative percentages side-by-side. 71.167.64.138 (talk) 17:49, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Here's a histogram version.

I was going to add a section about women and child wealth inequality and was wondering if this source was okay.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-4991.1988.tb00564.x — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hope Demont17 (talk • contribs) 17:09, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

NPOV Dispute

I came to this article wanting to get the facts on the loaded "Wealth Inequality" term I've heard from a lot of left-leaning sources. Here's the specific article that sent me searching, which cites a chart from "The Nation", described in its wp article as the "flagship of the left":

[[2]]

"Wealth inequality" is a loaded term by itself, since it suggests that "wealth equality" would be the norm. I don't object to the existence of the phrase, or an article about it, but given that the phrase is frequently used in a political context, the article should make the political undertones explicit.

Statements like "The lack of savings removes the poor any opportunity to accumulate wealth and better their conditions" are clearly untrue, since no poor person could ever become wealthy if they had no opportunities at all. They reflect the "this is unfair" undertone that permeates the article.

Mathematical statements like "Currently, the richest 1% hold about 38% of all privately held wealth in the United States.[2] while the bottom 90% held 73% of all debt.[10]", even if true, must be presented with care. The implication in such a statement is to wonder why the richest 1% don't hold 1% of the wealth, which is a mathematical impossibility. Even small standard deviations in wealth (that is, mostly flat income distributions) leave the top 1% of a distribution with significantly more than 1%.

This article is phrased neutrally, but its selection of terms and facts supports a political position without ever acknowledging the controversy inherent in the issue.Lunkwill (talk) 18:55, 12 April 2010

A section about the political implications of weath distribution in the United States would be helpful, I agree. The specific statement that you cite above has since been removed--I suggest we remove the NPOV tag.Sylvain1972 (talk) 14:57, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

This is a typical tactic of non-neutral parties, to invoke the power of statistics and thus some sort of scientific fact. The mere presence of percentages and mathematical relationships can lend incredibly biased statements a veneer of objectivity which many readers accept without conscious consideration of the merits of either the statement or the statistics presented. Most major media sources employ this tactic, sometimes without even realizing it themselves.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.80.152.98 (talk) 00:42, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps a bit loaded, to the extent that left-leaning pundits have adopted the term, but that doesn't automatically qualify the page for a NPOV violation. The phrase exists, and users are entitled to find out what it means. I propose making it explicit: state that the phrase has political connotations, and that people who favor a more uniform distribution of wealth regard it as a social problem. It's hard to avoid NPOV issues when the topic is, itself, a point of view (editing the page on "libertarianism" must be a ton of fun.) Statements of theories or conclusions should be prefaced with "Advocates of more uniform wealth distribution contend that ..." 68.173.53.167 (talk) 10:49, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

I also came to this article for a more neutral overview of the topic, but find it written with a hyper-opinionated bias towards certain viewpoints. Sentences like this: "There are many causes, including years of home ownership, household income, unemployment, and education but inheritance might be the most important", smack of people writing their opinions as facts (or phrased as almost-facts). Add in images like this [[3]] and, while factual, make the article an argument from emotions. That image is practically a propaganda image, and even has the politically-active organization's/movement's logo still on it! ComServant (talk) 08:10, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

I concur that, even after 10 years from the first critique, the article is heavily biased and that its political undertones should be made explicit. One needs not distorting logic and statistics, for example, to illustrate uneven wealth distribution in the US compared to most European Union countries. Most prominent sources of distortion: (a) the underlying assumption that wealth distribution should be flat (which never happened anywhere in history and is most likely impossible) and (b) the lack of clarification that most if not all the wealth statistics shown here concern Net Worth, i.e. after debt. --95.246.143.216 (talk) 06:51, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Effect on Democracy section - wording

This paragraph is poorly worded and unclear. Suggest direct quotes or better paraphrasing.

According to Jedediah Purdy, a researcher at the Duke School of Law, the inequality of wealth in the United States has constantly opened the eyes of the many problems and shortcomings of its financial system over at least the last fifty years of the debate. For years, people believed that distributive justice would produce a sustainable level of wealth inequality. It was also thought that a certain state would be able to effectively diminish the amount of inequality that would occur. Something that was for the most part not expected is the fact that the inequality levels created by the growing markets would lessen the power of that state and prevent the majority of the political community from actually being able to deliver on its plans of distributive justice, however it has just lately come to attention of the mass majority.

EarthCitizen-741963852 (talk) 03:36, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Wealth inequality table

Avatar, would it resolve your issue if the table started with 1989, rather than 2016?Farcaster (talk) 12:19, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Firstly, labeling the section "Changes during the Trump administration" when no sources support that the changes which occurred in the last 4 years are any different than the changes in the preceding 26 years is Original Research LEADING the reader to believe that something has changed, when NO SOURCES say that. "Effects of stock market gains" would be an acceptable sub-heading.

The NPR source is valid to talk about who owns stocks, so who benefits from stock market gains and the Vox source talks about the increase in Wealth Inequality in the previous 30 years due to company ownership, and states President Donald Trump passed a major tax bill in the previous session of Congress that was overwhelmingly targeted at reducing the tax burden on people who own businesses. The theory behind it is that by making it more lucrative to own businesses, you will spur more business investment, which ultimately creates jobs and raises wages. But as you can see in these charts, we’ve already been doing that for the past generation — and overall growth has been generally slow, with wages rising just a tiny bit faster than inflation.

I'd be ok with you using CBO data to show what the Vox graphs show: 1989 to 2018, top 1%, bottom 50%, but no more, with a statement to the effect of "wealthier people tend to own more stock than poorer people, who have more of their total assets in real estate; and the large gains of the stock markets over the last 30 years have benefited the richer people more than the poorer people." which is well supported by the Vox source: The top 1 percent of the US wealth distribution has increased its net worth by 650 percent since 1989, while the bottom 50 percent saw its wealth grow by a much more modest 170 percent during the same period. ... You’ll see that the bottom half of the income distribution had a huge share of its wealth tied up in real estate while owning essentially no shares of corporate stock. and a quote from the NPR source: That means the stock market rally can only directly benefit around half of all Americans — and substantially fewer than it would have a decade ago, when nearly two-thirds of families owned stock.

And I think a graph would be more informative than a table. ---Avatar317^(talk) 22:11, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

I'm fine with the "Effect of stock market gains" idea. The virtue of a table is we can update it easily with the latest information from the Fed, which is now available quarterly. I'll do 1989 to Q2 2020, Vox article is talking about the data set we're using and I'll have the Fed citation in there. If that bugs you, I'll find a citation that talks about it through Q2 2020, Liz Sonders (economist) tweeted about it today so I'll find something. Once the 1989-2020 table is in, we should be able to do the same thing with 2016-2020, to show what happened under Trump, continuation of the same story, no commentary if I can't find a citation on that. That should balance your concern about leading.Farcaster (talk) 23:19, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable. The Template:Vertical_bar_chart allows for a bar chart and is easily updatable since the text values are in the article, but it seems to only be able to handle one displayed variable. (Not top 1% and bottom 50%). ---Avatar317^(talk) 05:12, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Lack of neutral imposition.

This article doesn't appear to be neutral in any way when there is an article that discusses a controversial topic there must be a criticism page examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism#Criticism_and_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Criticism also while I was putting those links in the socialism the criticism section was 3 sentences long while the capitalism criticisms were 6 sections long anyway.

this is purely a problem that Wikipedia needs to fix the ideas of socialism communism and left-wing ideology are getting in easily while right economic PHRASES like corporatocracy have literal warnings that they are wrong at the top Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral please respect that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.67.205.125 (talk) 19:13, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

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Oxfam report

Regarding this revert @Avatar317: this source https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/20/business/oxfam-billionaires-davos/index.html states: The combined fortunes of the world's 26 richest individuals reached $1.4 trillion last year — the same amount as the total wealth of the 3.8 billion poorest people. Most of these mega-wealthy are American, according to the Forbes list of billionaires used by Oxfam.. I think this is a pretty interesting data point, it is supported by an independent RS and is directly related to the topic of the article. Unfortunately this source refers to the 2019 edition of the Oxfam report and we now have the 2021 data that has been recently published. The top 10 richest men are all American except one and are the same as the ones in the 2019 list. Either we stick to the original edit above (is it really synth?) or we can just include the older 2019 data (hasn't changed that much) with the source referencing directly that they are mostly Americans. If you see some other problem please let me know in advance so we can edit this once and for all. Thanks {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 21:44, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

Please read WP:SYNTH. "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any source. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. If one reliable source says A and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C not mentioned by either of the sources." - One source saying that "Most of these mega-wealthy are American," does not state ANYTHING about the wealth inequality that exists WITHIN the country of America, which is what this article is about. ---Avatar317^(talk) 22:26, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

Avatar317I'm aware of WP:SYNTH. The article states that those mega wealthy Americans own more than half of the rest of the world. That's a pretty clear data point regarding the distribution of wealth in the United States. The article directly references the Oxfam report in the context of domestic US policies. It is all within one reliable source which is reported above. So no Synth at all. Also, the Oxfam report was in the article before my edits and your revert. I'm just trying to update this to the latest 2021 report. But if you think this is stretching SYNTH we can just keep this source which references the 2018 data. Let me know if that is fine for you. -- {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 18:03, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

You may be aware of SYNTH, but you don't seem to be understanding it. Oxfam's report is about GLOBAL wealth inequality, and that study does not apply to the wealth inequality WITHIN the US any more than it applies to the wealth inequality WITHIN Botswana, Syria, SriLanka, Mongolia, or any other country. ---Avatar317^(talk) 06:01, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

I agree. Let's remove the Oxfam report from this article. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 15:37, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

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RAND study

Regarding this revert, @Avatar317: here are some secondary sources covering the RAND report:

1. https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/ (sans paywal)
2. https://www.marketplace.org/2020/12/08/new-rand-study-quantifies-cost-of-rising-us-inequality/
3. https://www.fastcompany.com/90550015/we-were-shocked-rand-study-uncovers-massive-income-shift-to-the-top-1
4. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1nb5f92v (peer reviewed, see footnote 28 on p. 237)
5. https://www.davidpublisher.com/index.php/Home/Article/index?id=47333.html (peer reviewed, see footnote 7 on p. 505)

I am happy to rewrite the three sentences out of Wikipedia's WP:VOICE to make it clear they are summarizing the report instead of reflecting secondary peer reviewed sources. Is that acceptable?

I'm also curious as to whether you would have any issues with including the wealth inequality informatiion in https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality (About CPBB)? Sandizer (talk) 02:59, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Avatar317 states that the RAND study is a primary source but it isn't. The source is a reliable secondary source and as stated here [4]: This research was funded by the Fair Work Center and conducted by RAND Education and Labor. This working paper is under review with a scholarly journal; although most RAND working papers are not subject to formal peer-review, this work has in fact completed RAND’s full research quality assurance and peer-review process. (emphasis included on the RAND page). I don't see any good reason not to include this so I've restored the edit. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 20:48, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Ok, so now that I've had a chance to look at the 5 secondary sources, you are right, the sourcing for this is fine, RAND is cited in the secondary sources.

BUT - this study and all secondary sources linked above describe this as an INCOME inequality issue NOT a WEALTH inequality issue, and therefore irrelevant to THIS article. We have an article named Income inequality in the United States so this content could go there.

For the CBPP source Sandizer linked in the last sentence: unless you can find secondary sources, "The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) is a progressive American think tank" so that is NOT a Reliable Source in itself. ---Avatar317^(talk) 00:18, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

The $50 trillion and other cumulative results refer to wealth, not income. Sandizer (talk) 00:24, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

From your Time source above: "A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades." ---Avatar317^(talk) 00:34, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Wealth is NOT income. ---Avatar317^(talk) 00:36, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

From the MarketPlace.org source: "“Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018” (name of the RAND report) looked at inequality in two ways: income distribution over a 45-year period and income growth in relation to broader economic growth, " ---Avatar317^(talk) 00:38, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I think you're being pedantic. It's WP:CK common knowledge that income is the source of wealth, and it seems absurd to talk about a $50 trillion difference over generations as income instead of the mathematically equivalent wealth difference, but if you insist that the passage be moved then I would rather not argue about it. But why are you also removing the Picchi and World Inequality Report summaries? Sandizer (talk) 04:26, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

The problem with what you call "common knowledge" is that "common knowledge" is often "common misconception" or "common misunderstanding" as you are demonstrating here. When low-income people gain income, they generally spend ALL of that new income (adding to short term economic growth) and save NOTHING, which means that they accumulate ZERO wealth. When higher-income people make more money (like reduced tax that would have been transferred to low-income earners) they SAVE some portion of it, which adds to their wealth. ---Avatar317^(talk) 22:48, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

That's a fair point, but I think it's an overgeneralization to say low-income earners won't save with more pay just because they haven't been able to with less. Sandizer (talk) 19:07, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

You are correct. I realized that I should have also included in my paragraph above this better explanation: the data shows that as you go up the income ladder, households save greater PERCENTAGES of their incomes. ---Avatar317^(talk) 20:11, 25 February 2023 (UTC)