Mathew Arnold, a 19th century English essayist once stated, “Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.” Indeed.
The United States has wider wealth disparity than any other developed country. (These are financial assets like cash, bank deposits, corporate stocks, and private and public bonds.) In 2001, the richest tenth of households in the US owned around 80% of the country’s financial assets. The bottom 80% held 9%. As the chart below illustrates, in 2009 the top 1% held 35% of the wealth.
It’s good to be rich: you rake in income whether or not you have a job and you’re of course buffered from the volatility of the business cycle. But wealth inequality is not so great for society. Aside from the obvious moral concerns, research has shown that more equal societies are much more likely to trust each other, health outcomes are better, and homicide rates are lower.
And in the words of American poet Walt Whitman, “The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds—where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough—a modest living—and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”
Based on 2006 Field Guide to the US Economy. “Who Owns How Much?” 1.1: p. 3.
Revised and Updated by Member Economist Sue Holmberg
October 2011
Sources:
http://inequality.org/wealth-inequality/
http://inequality.org/quotes/
