literature review paper

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Running head: ANALYZING THE WEALTH GAP BETWEEN DIFFERENT CLASSES

Analyzing the wealth gap between different classes

Bruce Xu

University of Miami

Introduction: Introduce the topic and three themes

Wealth gap, the increasing concentration of wealth in fewer hands, has been called the “defining challenge of our time”(Buttrick and Oishi, 2017). In Hero and Levy’s article(2016), it is also called “the great divergence of America’s rich from its middle class and poor.” In fact, the “mordern” wealth inequality can be traced to the evolution of human survival from foraging to farming more than 10,000 years ago(Patel and Bagchi, 2018). For the United States, its origin was in the early of the 20th century. According to David and Jonathan(2016), the wealth inequality began a long but modest decline since 1929. However, this trajectory reversed throughout the industrialized world during the last 40 years(Buttrick and Oishi, 2017).

Wealth inequality occurs in many countries among many kinds of people. This paper is going to discuss the wealth inequality between different classes of people in America. Especially, it analyzes wealth gap between the citizens from middle class and lower class. The middle class of the U.S. are those earning between two-thirds and double the median household income. This means that the category of middle – income is made up of people making somewhere between $40,500 and $122,000, which represents the majority of the American. Those who do not participate in the labor force and rely on public assistance as their main source of income are commonly identified as members of the lower class.

This paper provides a literature review among ten articles about the topic. What’s more, it will examine three themes based on the topic, which are the elements and factors lead to the wealth inequality, the negative impact of the wealth gap in the U.S. on the resident’s life and the possible solutions of this phenomenon.

Literature Review

The elements and factors lead to the wealth inequality

As a national problem, wealth inequality has so many causes.