CAPITAL & MAIN’S NEW MONTH-LONG SERIES EXPLORES HOW ECONOMIC INEQUALITY IS TRANSFORMING CALIFORNIA, AND WHAT CAN BE DONE TO REBUILD OUR VANISHING MIDDLE CLASS.
The California Chasm
As it pushes historic levels, inequality has become a hot topic. Activists have organized around the rich-poor divide, with “The One Percent” and “The 99 Percent” becoming a part of everyday language. The President made inequality a focus of this year’s State of the Union address and called for a new “middle-class economics.” And a French economist, Thomas Piketty, reached the top of the American best seller list – when did that last happen? – with a dense volume called Capital in the Twenty-First Century that has jump-started a global conversation about the distribution of income and wealth.
The stakes are high and the solutions are emergent. Some reasonably point to reining in excess wealth – after all, as the California Budget Project has noted, in 2010, the incomes of California’s 41,000 millionaires added up to nearly $144 billion, seven times the income needed to lift every Californian out of poverty. But any real solution also needs a broader strategy to raise the floor on wages and employment standards, create pathways to good jobs that include efforts targeting underrepresented groups, and encourage a new vision of more inclusive growth.
Dr. Manuel Pastor is Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where he also serves as Director of USC’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) and Co-Director of USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII).
Dan Braun works with unions, social justice groups and others engaged in creative change campaigns. He lives in Echo Park, Los Angeles.
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