Ralph Nader on inequality in the United States | How Rich Are Getting Richer and Poor Are Getting Poorer

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Over the last 30 years, wage inequality in the United States has increased substantially, with the overall level of inequality now approaching the extreme level that prevailed prior to the Great Depression. This general characterization of the inequality trend oversimplifies, though, the actual pattern of change: The chart below shows that the trend at the top of the income distribution (the “upper tail”) is not exactly the same as the trend at the bottom of the distribution (the “lower tail”). “Lower-tail” inequality is measured here by taking the ratio of wages at the middle of the income distribution (i.e., the 50th percentile) to those near the bottom of the distribution (i.e., the 10th percentile); “upper-tail” inequality is measured by taking the ratio of wages near the top of the distribution (i.e., the 90th percentile) to those at the middle of the distribution (i.e., the 50th percentile of workers). We find that lower-tail inequality rose sharply in the 1980s and contracted somewhat thereafter, while upper-tail inequality has increased steadily since 1980.

Recent decades have seen a clear increase in the difference between CEO compensation and that of the average worker in manufacturing or “production.” CEOs in 1965 made 24 times more than the average production worker, whereas in 2009 they made 185 times more. This chart shows how this ratio between the compensation of CEOs and production workers took off in the 1980s.

U.S. CEO pay in relation to the average production worker's compensation

There are 750,000 Americans who are homeless on any given night, with one in five of them considered chronically homeless. The ranks of the sheltered homeless include disproportionate numbers of males, blacks, middle-aged people (i.e., ages 31-50), veterans, and disabled.

Only college graduates have experienced growth in median weekly earnings since 1979 (in real terms). High school dropouts have, by contrast, seen their real median weekly earnings decline by about 22 percent.

Throughout much of the 20th century, the average woman earned about 60% of what the average man earned. Starting in the late 1970s, there was a substantial increase in women’s relative earnings, with women coming to earn about 80% of what men earned. This historic rise plateaued in 2005 and, since then, the pay gap has remained roughly unchanged.

Women and men tend to work in very different occupations. And overall “men’s jobs” are better paid than “women’s jobs.”

High-school dropout rates are least among whites and highest among Hispanics, while college enrollment rates are least among blacks and highest among whites. The high-school dropout rate has grown more similar among these three groups, while the college enrollment rate has grown more sharply different.

Racial discrimination continues to be in the labor market. An experiment carried out in Chicago and Boston during 2001 and 2002 shows that resumes with “white-sounding” names, whether male or female, were much more likely to result in call backs for interviews than were those with “black-sounding” names (even though the resumes were otherwise identical).