Are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer?

Answer 1

The truth? Yes.

Answer 2

I dont think the poor are getting poorer, at least in the USA but I think that the gap between Rich and poor is growing at a faster rate. Middle class wage increases do not seem to be keeping up with the actual rate of inflation (not the BS that the government puts out) I believe real purchasing power is decreasing but also I believe people are not as fiscally conservative as they used to be either and can cut back quite a bit if they had to. I think we have a lot more to spend our money on these days, most people have a home phone plus 2 or more cell phones per family, each family has an equal number of cars as they have driving age people, cable TV, Internet, entertainment is a huge expense that did not exist before i.e movies, music, shopping for enjoyment, etc etc. People do not cook anymore, by cooking basic foods and not using convenience food you can cut your food bill in half. I have found by cutting back and not including housing I can live on about 6000$ per year as a single person. By doing this I can save my money for things I truly enjoy such a traveling, education and hobbies.

Answer 3

Generally speaking, yes; the rich are getting a lot richer, the poor are getting a little poorer. But this always happens during periods of low inflation. When inflation returns (and it probably will pretty soon), the wealth gap will shrink again, much like it did in the 1970s.

Answer 4

Are the rich people getting richer? I think so. Money makes money. So save what ever you can because you can also make more money. Are the poor people getting poorer? I do not think so. They are getting better. I see this in my country and in other countries I have visited. Also for my work I study the development of different countries. Look at www.worldbank.org

Answer 5

No. Everyone is getting richer. The rich may be getting richer at a faster rate than the poor, but that's not the same thing.

Answer 6

Are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer?


first, the rich have got rich, and the poor have got poor - the rich getting richer etc has been going on for millenia, since specialisation of jobs necessitating transaction

fortnightly pay now ranges from $1 to $1 billion

200 years after america and france were constituted on liberty, equality, fraternity, the world is at the most extreme inequality unliberty and unfraternity [=unfriendliness]

1% get 90% of world income - US$70 trillion a year - and do less than 1% of the work - and the underpaid 99% get 10%

justice [=equality, nontheft] is equal pay for equal work - and we have an injustice factor of one billion or 100 billion% - ie, ratio between highest and lowest pay per unit of work is one billion

with violence proportional - money equals all needs and millions of wants - so theft of money is the gravest evil, the deepest injury, making the greatest resentment

we have pay from a million times to a 1000th of average - it only takes 8000 people being paid from the average up to a million times the average to take all earnings off every worker in the world - and we are just 10% away from that

injustice = theft = violence

and violence is escalative, as both sides, the robbers and the robbed, try to win

and we are able to destroy the whole planet now - 60 times over, by atomic smoke blocking out the sun permanently

everyone knows that money makes money, that the second million is easier to rake than the first thousand is to make, that after the first million, money mutiplies like rabbits, that business is other people's money, that business is just selling for more than you paid, that the merchant buys cheap and sells dear

everyone knows that manipulation of supply and demand can give money for nothing ie, for no work - eg, close the rural areas, hence have an oversupply of labour, hence dirtcheap labour - or prevent imports of grain in a famine and thus push the price of grain skyhigh, and so on and on - land is a monopoly: who controls the land controls and owns everything

there are many many wideopen legal ways for money to move from workers to nonworkers, eg, a person buys land, others do the work of building a city round that land, and the owner of the land gets free money, ie value in that land that the builders of the city made, eg, waldorfs, westminster

new technology is naturally in high demand, low supply - hence prices way above costs [eg, computers, electricity when it was new]

inequality is built into transaction itself: the values [work content] of things cannot be equal - the chances of them being exactly equal are infinitesimal - so the values are x and x+y - so every transaction is a fair-exchange-no-robbery [x for x] plus an automatic theft of an amount equal to y

over trillions of transactions, this drop of inequality becomes an ocean - the rich get richer

plus every seller is trying to force x and x+y as far apart as they can, ie, increase the injustice, theft

plus money is a moneymagnet, money is power, so money is used to make money by power - eg plunder, monopoly, cartels, inside information on markets, etc, etc

all this can be stopped by setting a limit to fortunes at the just earnable level [US$2 million], and the spreading of the overfortunes equally among everyone, as the founding fathers intended, to prevent tyranny [=concentration of wealth]

then there is no theft, violence, escalation and extinction looming

then there is peace, justice, equality, fraternity, happiness, freedom, democracy [in reality, not just an empty shell] and a future for humanity - and no one is underpaid, everyone, including homemakers and students, is on US$15 an hour, every family working average hard is on US$75,000 a year

but humans simply do not have enough brains for this great improvement in quality of life

end of story

Answer 7

Yes, the gap between the rich and the poor is getting wider. Trickle-down economics is a farce.

I made more money an hour 25 years ago then I am being offered in the market place, today.

My brother has been out of high school 10 years and is only making fifty-cents more an hour than he did when he was a junior in high school.

Answer 8

The rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor. If you doubt it, ponder these numbers from the US, a country widely considered meritocratic, where talent and hard work are thought to be enough to propel anyone through the ranks of the rich. In 1979, the top 1% of the US population earned, on average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20%. In 2000, this multiplier had grown to 88.5. If inequality is growing in the US, what does this mean for other countries?

Almost certainly more of the same, if you believe physicists who are using new models based on simple physical laws to understand the distribution of wealth. Their studies indicate that inequality in market economies may be very hard to get rid of.

In 1897, a Paris-born engineer named Vilfredo Pareto showed that the distribution of wealth in Europe followed a simple power-law pattern, which essentially meant that the extremely rich hogged most of a nation's wealth (New Scientist print edition, 19 August 2000). Economists later realised that this law applied to just the very rich, and not necessarily to how wealth was distributed among the rest.

Now it seems that while the rich have Pareto's law to thank, the vast majority of people are governed by a completely different law. Physicist Victor Yakovenko of the University of Maryland in College Park, US, and his colleagues analysed income data from the US Internal Revenue Service from 1983 to 2001.

They found that while the income distribution among the super-wealthy - about 3% of the population - does follow Pareto's law, incomes for the remaining 97% fitted a different curve - one that also describes the spread of energies of atoms in a gas.



In the gas model, people exchange money in random interactions, much as atoms exchange energy when they collide. While economists' models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat people like atoms in a gas.

The analogy also holds because money is like energy, in that it has to be conserved. "It's like a fluid that flows in interactions, it's not created or destroyed, only redistributed," says Yakovenko.

Yakovenko also found that the total income of those in the poorer part of the distribution did not change significantly with time after accounting for inflation. But incomes for those in the Pareto curve shot up nearly five times from 1983 to 2000, before declining with the US stock market crash of 2001.

A more sophisticated model developed by Bikas Chakrabarti of the SINP and his colleagues paints a slightly less bleak picture for the poor. His team adjusted the gas model to allow people to save various proportions of their money.

This model predicts both the wealth classes that Yakovenko found. It also suggests that if you save more you are more likely to end up rich, although there are no guarantees. Changing people's saving habits could be an effective way of making the wealth distribution fairer, rather than enforcing taxes, says Chakrabarti, who is one of the Kolkata conference(on the econophysics of wealth distribution) organisers.

The models are understandably simplistic to start with (they would be too difficult to model otherwise), but would need to take into account the fact that wealth (not just money) can be, and indeed is, created and destroyed - there is no law of conservation of wealth.

I wonder how things would change if everyone was assured access to education.

Answer 9

This is very much the truth. And worse than this is that the middle class is disappearing. We will soon be left with either the very poor or the very rich. No in between. No going back. Mass Debt is to blame.

Answer 10

It feels this way to me. Real estate prices have gone through the roof...and therefore, rents are very high, too. Many people really struggle to just keep the basics going...others are living beyond their means through credit cards. The national credit card debt is also through the roof. People are filing bankruptcy in record numbers. Then I see whole neighborhoods that look like they don't have a care in the world...and often speak to me of $15,000.00 entertainment sets...and it makes me go "Hm." I think it will get worse before it gets better...and the gap continues to grow. "Getting out of debt" has become big business.

Answer 11

of course
it is called capitalism!

that means if you do not own capital (aka a share of a business or stock or property), you are screwed

if you are a proletariat (worker) then you can expect more and more competiton and dropping wages as globalization is forced on the world and productivity increases.

and corporations and the governments they control want wages to stay low or even drop in the third world. they do not want competion from other capitalists there