How Did America's Wealth Inequality Reach This Level of Toxic?

We are just beginning to understand one further dimension of toxic inequality: a devastating emotional and physiological phenomenon we might call “toxic inequality syndrome.”

Thomas Piketty’s best-selling 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, brought attention to a different kind of inequality with a focus on capital. Yet many popular and academic accounts of inequality, spurred by media coverage and the emerging national discourse, continued to focus on income disparities, economic class, and the mega-rich. A preoccupation with income led to an insufficient understanding of the new inequality that left wealth out of the picture. President Barack Obama provided perhaps the crowning moment in this new public attention to economic inequality when he proclaimed in a December 2014 speech that inequality “is the defining challenge of our time.” But the president’s speech referenced income inequality eleven times and wealth inequality once. Leaving wealth out of the conversation is a crucial mistake, giving fodder to those who would make personal poverty the result of personal failings.

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The World on a Billionaire's Budget

Originally posted at theconversation.com The world’s wealthiest are prospering. As of February 2017, there were about 2,000 billionaires in the world. This micro-elite controls over US$7.6 trillion, an increase of 18 percent from 2016. A billionaire’s spending power is difficult to grasp, both because most people do not correctly intuit large numbers, and because a billion dollars far outstrips most people’s experience. What does a household budget look like to a billionaire? To find out, let’s scale down a billionaire’s income to $50,000, the median American income, adjusting budget items proportionally. A year in the life of Joe Billionaire To start, we need to estimate a billionaire’s annual income. In the 30 years from 1987 to 2016, Bill and Melinda Gates amassed about $120 billion. This figure represents $80 billion in net worth and $40 billion controlled by their charitable foundation. The Gates’ average annual income for these years is $120 billion divided by 30, or $4 billion. ...

Preventing Crimes Against Humanity in the US

Immigrant rights advocates speak against Trump’s policies in New Mexico. AP Photo/Russell Contreras, File By Nadia Rubaii , Binghamton University, State University of New York and Max Pensky , Binghamton University, State University of New York There are those who say that comparing President Donald Trump’s rhetoric to that of Adolf Hitler is alarmist, unfair and counterproductive. And yet, there has been no dearth of such comparisons nearly one and a half years into his term. Many commentators have also drawn parallels between the conduct and language of Trump supporters and Holocaust-era Nazis . Recent news of ICE agents separating immigrant families and housing children in cages have generated further comparisons by world leaders, as well as Holocaust survivors and scholars. Trump’s use of the word “infest” to refer to immigrants coming to the U.S. is particularly striking. Nazis referred to infestations of Jewish vermin, ...

The Slippery Slope of Dehumanizing Language

Roseanne Barr had her sitcom canceled on May 29, after calling former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett the child of an ape. Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File By Allison Skinner , Northwestern University Comparing people to animals seems to increasingly be a part of our political discourse. When Roseanne Barr tweeted that former White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett was the child of an ape , it came only a couple of weeks after Donald Trump called immigrant gang members, “ animals .” Trump has been a target himself: On the cover of its April 2 issue, New York magazine depicted the president as a pig . As a psychologist who studies social attitudes and intergroup relations, I get a bit uneasy when I see these types of insults get normalized. At their core, they’re a way to dehumanize others – a practice that can have pernicious effects. In a range of studies, psychologists have been able to show how dehumanizing messages can ...

Illusions Revolt!

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