Summary of “Inequality for all”
The presentation on Feb 19th played a documentary “Inequality for all” directed by
Jacob Kornbluth for us. This documentary mainly talked about three issues
concerning inequality: (1) what is “inequality”, (2) why “inequality” happens and (3)
how inequality become a problem. One way to measure the extent to ”Inequality” in
this lecture is to use data of income distribution among people in U.S. The research
showed that 400 people is much wealthier than half of the population in United States
and especially 1% people in the 4% is fabulous wealthy group, which means the
income is highly concentrated in U.S. It is demonstrated by an analysis that United
States ranks 64th in Income Equality. Many in the middle class said although their
wage is around $50,000 annually, they can’t feel they are living in a comfortable life,
and therefore they don’t think they belong to a member of this class. Looking to the
IRS tax return, we will find 1928 and 2007 become 2 peak years of income
concentration and what happen to these two years afterwards is two big crashes. The
wealth in these two years run into finance section such as housing, gold, speculative
instruments and debt instruments.
What problem occurs because of income inequality? He stated that the rich in
fabulous group who save money to invest funds in global capital market, get highest
return and finally make little contribution to social utility. However, the middle class
is the true group who keep the economy going because they are more like to spend
