Income Inequality- Part One

Fall 2017

Designing a Sustainable Future: A New economy as if People Mattered

Session Four: Income Inequality/part 1

Music: Cindi Lauper, "Money Changes Everything" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=202o_JS7E04

Essential questions:

• What is a sustainable income level? (Living wage)

• How can a society create access to the goods and services that are available?

• How is income currently distributed in the US Economy?

• What happens when the income gap widens?

• How does one define a fair distribution of income in a society?

Gathering: After looking at the Preferred State, Present State or Incubator ideas that we have created, I would like to add the following idea…”

Video: Robert Reich, "Inequality for All," 2013, 

Closing: Something that I learned in this session was…..

Readings:

• Jeffery Sachs, “Why America must revive its middle –class,” Time, 10/10/11 http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Published%20Writing/Time%20Final.pdf

• Angus Deaton, “It’s not just unfair: inequality is a threat to our governance,” book review, Ganesh Sitaraman,  “ The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, Why Economic In equality Threatens our Republic,” New York Times, March 20, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/books/review/crisis-of-the-middle-class-constitution-ganesh-sitaraman-.html

Resources:

Video: Jacob Hecker & Paul Pierson, “Engineered Inequality,”  Moyers and Company, March 1, 2012

http://billmoyers.com/segment/jacob-hacker-paul-pierson-on-engineered-inequality/

• Robert Reich, "Inequality for All," film graphics http://inequalityforall.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/A_Visual_StoryPDF.pdf

• Neil Irwin, " To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now," NYTImes, 9/3/17 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=Trending&version=Full&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

• Bill Moyers and Paul Krugman, "What the 1% Don't want You to Know,"  Moyers and Company, April 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzQYA9Qjsi0

There are two modes of invading private property; the first, by which the poor plunder the rich...sudden and violent; the second, by which the rich plunder the the poor, slow and legal.
John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814)