The economic reality of the United States today is one of vast inequality in wealth and living standards. At present, 31.1 million households do not have enough food to eat in an average year. Housing within the means of average Americans is increasingly scarce, forcing people, including families, to live on the streets. Even for those who are insured, medical care involves ever-increasing costs for routine and critical care.
This suffering is not evenly distributed among the working class. Almost half of all Black children today grow up in poverty, compared to 15 percent of white children. The Indigenous nations that predated the United States, their land stolen and most of their population slaughtered, have had only small tracts of land returned to them, where incomes are markedly lower than the rest of the nation, and acquiring medical care and other basic needs is a struggle for many.
This is notable in itself, but it stands in stark contrast to the lifestyles of a privileged few. With the exception of the 2008 financial crisis, the country’s GDP has grown every single year for many decades. Worker productivity has skyrocketed, yet the value created did not accrue to working people suffering in intense poverty. So where has all that value gone?
Wealth accrued to a very small number of people in the United States while the many go without. Of the richest ten families on the planet today, half are U.S. citizens. Of the ten wealthiest individuals on the planet today, seven are U.S. citizens. The three people at the top of this list have a net worth as equal to that of the poorer 50% of the country combined.
The United States is only one among many nations in which this state of affairs can be seen: widespread, profound lack, among more than plenty concentrated in the hands of few. The situation replicates itself on a global scale as well: the pervasive lack of basic needs for the many in the United States stands in the shadow of an ever more pervasive lack of basic needs endured by workers in South America, Africa, or many parts of Asia. This is reflected in the fact that eight people alone hold as much wealth as the poorer 50% of the entire world combined.
The phenomenon of plenty for the few, and little for the many, is representative of an economic arrangement that spans nearly the entire globe. That economic arrangement is Capitalism.
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Illustration by:
Andrew Nance
