The United States is no longer a place of equality, at least, the wealth distribution do not show in this way. According to the analysis of Professor Edward Wolff of New York University, the Americans are having the largest gap between rich and poor since 1920s.
The big gap is worrying. The top 20 per cent of the wealthy Americans own about 85 per cent of the wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent own almost 0 per cent of them, many of them even have negative net wealth.
Redistribution of wealth remains the hot button issue in the country. Whether the government should put more effort to help the poor, and should the government be less favour to the rich, all these issues are on the hot list to be addressed.
Michael I. Norton, an associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, have recently conducted a survey on this issue.
They have asked more than 5,000 Americans to estimate the situation of wealth inequality in the U.S.
Most Americans have underestimated the wealth inequality, in which they estimated that the top 20 per cent owned 60 per cent of the wealth and the bottom 40 per cent owned 10 per cent.
It shows that most surveyed Americans recognized the gap between the rich and poor is too high and wanted a more equal wealth distribution.
To transfer wealth from the rich to poor is on the hot list of the government, but how? It is meant to be a political divisive question inevitably.
