Inequality Is Not Quality: Principles of Economy

This past term in our Economics: Risking Value STEM class, we’ve spent our time studying the formulas that are commonly used in various financial situations and how to apply them to our daily lives. In this unit, specifically, we’ve been studying the various facets of our economy, and what our place is within that economy.

For this final action project for Economics, we had to look at Kate Raworth’s 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist, and come up with an 8th principle on our own. And, after looking into Kate Raworth’s principles, and one of Raworth’s standout books, Doughnut Economics, I’ve come up with my own principle for 21st century economics: Inequality Is Not Quality.

Why "Inequality Is Not Quality", you may ask? Because, in our current and unsustainable economy, economic inequality between the rich and the poor of our country is a serious current issue. It’s one that very much needs to be addressed by the next generation of economists as soon as we can

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2018, the top 20% of the population earned a whopping 52% of all U.S. income, with their average household income being $223,895. And the richest of the rich, the top 5%, earned another 23% of all income, with their average household income being $416,520. That’s 75% of our country’s total income when combined! Meanwhile, the bottom 20% of the population earned only 3.1% of our country’s total income, with their average household income being a mere $13,775.




How Things Are Now, WH, 2020.

“Extreme inequality, as it turns out, is not an economic law or necessity: it is a design failure.” Said Raworth in Doughnut Economics, and I strongly agree with her. Things are still very much largely unequal between the rich and the poor at the moment, and that gap is only going to continue to increase as long as we sit by and don’t do anything to change the economic system. Unless we are able to find an equilibrium between the rich and the poor, the rich are just going to keep getting richer while the poor just keep getting poorer. According to The University of California, Berkley, between 1993 and 2015 the average family income grew by 25.7%. The top 1% of the population received 52% of that growth, which is a pretty crazy amount compared to how much growth everyone else got. Instead of the way it is now, our economy should be structured so that everyone is on as much of an equal level as possible. Or, at least, we should attempt to narrow that gap between the rich in the poor by a significant margin.


How Things Should Be, WH, 2020.


In conclusion, I thought that this project was very fun and interesting to work on. I liked taking a bit of a deeper dive into the mechanics of our economy, and fleshing out my own principle for it. What I struggled with on the project was creating the images required; I'm not a very good artist, myself, so I had to look for help from The Noun Project, a website with creative commons logos, to help me in their creation. 

Citations:

Amadeo, Kimberly. “The True Cause of Income Inequality in America.” The Balance, 18 May 2020,
        www.thebalance.com/income-inequality-in-america-3306190. 
Bureau, US Census. “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2018.” The United States Census Bureau, 26 June 2020, 
        www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-266.html. 
Kate Raworth. It's Competition Time! 30 May 2019,
        www.kateraworth.com/2019/01/28/8thwaycompetition/. 
Noun Project Logos: Person. thenounproject.com/search/?q=person. 
Noun Project Logos: Rich Person. thenounproject.com/search/?q=rich+person. 
Noun Project Logos: Scales. thenounproject.com/search/?q=scales. 
Raworth, Kate. Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist. 5 Apr. 2017,
        www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/seven-ways-to-think-like-21st-century-economist/. 

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