The Rich and Poor Economic Assumption

However, even outlying(prenominal) downstairs the "star" level, a current article in The hem in Street Journal discusses young couples in their 20s who -- in substantial numbers -- are buying million-dollar houses (Dunham, 1997).

On the other emplacement of the traditional equation, the focus of attention and concern in well-nigh discussions of rising inequality is not "the poor" -- a shape which in modern American worldly concern usage is intimately synonymous with minority groups, especi on the wholey blacks, living in urban slums, and on whom little public sympathy is expended. Instead, the attention at least among the politically shrewd is on "the be givening poor," or "working Americans," or some other such looking at: all are ways of speaking of the working family unit while avoiding any hint of Marxist connotation.

If the last decennium has been characterized by public fascination with the rich, it has also been characterized by public anxiety about the working class. "The secure jobs" -- factory work that paid well in proportion to the education and skills demand -- are said to withdraw vanished or been moved overseas, and been replaced by low-paid work in fast-food restaurants, our cultural symbol of the low-skilled service sector. anxiety has spread upward from the working class to the middle class; as companies downsize, a process which in the early 90s reached far into middle management, a sense has grown of economic polarization, an horrible pictu

Dunham, K. (1997, October 17). Gen-X buyers favor pricey get-go homes. The Wall Street Journal, p. B-16.

The answer, likely, is essentially political. Assembly-line work, the archetypal unskilled "good job," was also the architypal unionized job: union membership as a proportion of the work force peaked in the mid-1950s. A variety of factors make factory work in cleaveicular well-suited to unionization. Most factories were large, employing hundreds or thousands of workers, often a substantial part of the whole work force in a community. This was contributive to labor solidarity: nearly everyone in a community, even those not working at the plant, were likely to be aware of conditions there. If a grievance arose, everyone knew about it.

Union organizers could walk down the passage with good likelihood of finding potential recruits.

First to be considered is the fate of skilled blue-collar jobs. It is true that a soldiery of such jobs have been eliminated, such as draftsmen by the creation of computer-aided design technology. So have these jobs' white-collar counterparts, such as clerk or bank teller, replaced by computers or machine-driven teller machines.

However, the actual picture appears to be more tangled than simply "natural" (economistic) stratification by education or training. A common allegation about the economy since the eighties is that "the good jobs" have disappeared, either eliminated, moved overseas, or made less good by de-skilling.

More generally still, the susceptibility of stars of all sorts to command very high incomes has become a feature of the culture (Frank and Cook, 1995, 61ff). An ironic nod to this cultural positioning is offered by state lotteries, which offer enormous prizes for the sake of visibility, though it must mean that the secondary prizes (the only ones lottery players have any significant chance of winning) must be smaller.

Whether all this has actually happened, and if so why and to what degree, are questions
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