photo by Don Shall/flickr
To respond to the Do Now, you can comment below or tweet your response. Be sure to begin your tweet with @KQEDEdspace and end it with #DoNowIncome
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Do Now
There’s a huge and growing gap between the richest Americans and just about everyone else. Why (or why not) do you think income inequality is a problem in our society? What does work look like in your community? What is the spectrum of jobs and class?
Introduction
Several years have passed since Occupy Wall Street protests flared up throughout the country, and although the issue has largely faded from national debate, the degree of income inequality that sparked the movement remains rampant.
This movement began in 2011 where protesters around the world demanded an end to what they describe as corporate greed and bank bailouts while ordinary people lose their homes, with no subsidy to rescue them.
Since then, these protests have died down, but little has changed. A disproportionate share of the nation’s income is now being amassed by just a tiny sliver of the population, creating a huge economic divide between the few have’s and the many have-not’s. But it wasn’t always this way. Find out what happened in this illustrated infographic on The Lowdown
Resource
PBS NewsHour video Land of the Free, Home of the Poor
Financial gains over the last decade in the United States have been mostly made at the “tippy-top” of the economic food chain as more people fall out of the middle class. The top 20 percent of Americans now holds 84 percent of U.S. wealth, as Paul Solman found out as part of a Making Sen$e series on economic inequality.
To respond to the Do Now, you can comment below or tweet your response. Be sure to begin your tweet with @KQEDedspace and end it with #DoNowIncome
For more info on how to use Twitter, click here.
We encourage students to reply to other people’s tweets to foster more of a conversation. Also, if students tweet their personal opinions, ask them to support their ideas with links to interesting/credible articles online (adding a nice research component) or retweet other people’s ideas that they agree/disagree/find amusing. We also value student-produced media linked to their tweets. You can visit our video tutorials that showcase how to use several web-based production tools. Of course, do as you can… and any contribution is most welcomed.
More Resources
Tuva Labs datasets The Rising Income Inequality in the US
The long-term trend over the last few decades has been toward increasing income inequality. The wage distribution has become considerably more unequal, with workers at the top experiencing real wage gains and those at the bottom real wage losses. These changes reflect relative shifts in demand for labor differentiated on the basis of education and skill.
New York Times newsgraphic Mapping Poverty in America
Data from the Census Bureau show where the poor live.
Huff Post infographic One Chart That Shows America’s Mind-Blowing Income Gap
Occupy Wall Street is all but gone, while income inequality appears here to stay. Such is life in the United States of America, where the divide between rich and poor can sometimes feel like one of the country’s only true constants.
