Inequality is one of the big problems of the
United States.
But it's also a big problem of the world.
To start with a problem for the United States,
inequality with the United States, everybody
knows by now the numbers the 1% or 0.1% of
the people have 80% of the money in the United
States.
One might say if you're rich, you might say
well, "Isn't that sad?
But those poor people, they're poor because
they're lazy and they're not trying hard and
the American dream is rags to riches.
They're poor because it's all their fault."
Well, the big reason that they are poor is
because they are getting crummy educations,
because American support for education has
declined, because where you live is tied to
the quality of the school where you're at.
And if you get a crummy education, you're
going to end up with a crummy job and you're
going to end up poor.
In the United States the correlation between
the income of parents and the income of their
children when they grow up is higher than
in any other country in the world, meaning
that if you want to be rich, if you are a
child and you want to be rich, the best thing
to do is to be born to rich parents.
There's is a cruel joke which says if you
are a baby, choose your parents carefully,
because that's the best predictor of whether
you end up rich or not.
You can say so what difference does it make
for the rich people if there are all these
unhappy unproductive poor people?
Well, in my lifetime in Los Angeles, twice
I've experienced riots in my city of Los Angeles,
where the riots broke out in the center of
the city where there were lots of poor people,
miserable, recognizing that they didn't have
any long term prospects.
And they started rioting and they burning,
they started burning.
Sections like Beverly Hills that the rioters
would spread out of the center of Los Angeles
and start wrecking Beverly Hills.
So what did the police do in Beverly Hills?
The only thing they could do was to string
up strips of this yellow plastic police tape
across the main boulevards with signs that
said rioters keep out.
Well, at the time of the last riots, the rioters,
it happened, did not invade Beverly Hills.
But you can bet there will be more if there's
Inequality continuing in the United States,
there'll be more riots.
And the next time the rioters are going to
invade Beverly Hills and they will be burning
and doing other bad things there.
And yellow strips of plastic police tape will
not keep them out.
So what does inequality mean for the United
States?
It's really bad for those Americans at the
lower end of the spectrum, but it's going
to be bad, and maybe fatally bad, for rich
Americans.
