The documentary by Reich elaboartes on the issues facing the modern soicety today, not only in the U.S but alos in other jurisdications within the larger global economy. Specifically, he explores economic inequality, how its affecting us and what could be done to mitigate against its effects. As porpounded by Prof. Reich, economic inequaity is an issue affecting a significnant proportion of the population. It can be said that those of a differeing opinion are probably those belonging to the top 1%. The extent of economic inequaity is manifest in civil movements such as The Occupy Wall-Street movement, the Green Party as well as the various industrial strikes regulalry organized by workers all around the globe (Milanovic, 2016).
As explained by Prof. Reich, most of the world’s wealth are held by only 1% of the poplation. These are the wealthy individuals in the society who own sifingicant factors of production and hence control and influence economic and political systems, both in their countries and the world. The problem is that this 1% do not utlize a significant proportion of their wealth in real-economic activities. These are the activities that have the greates potential in generating jobs for the massess as well as real goods and services (Milanovic, 2016).
That is, they essentially hoard their wealth and choose to invest it in speculative markets so as to generate even more money for themselves. Th downside to these avenues of investments is that theu do not, atleast directly, enhance employment levels or goods and services. Besides, Reich argues that the top 1% tend to engage in selfish activities that end huriting the economy. That is, if the economy is not doing good, the top 1% may withdraw their resources resulting in lay-offs as well as scaling down of production activities. Unfortunately, their selfish considerations only end up huring the economy even further (Milanovic, 2016).
From Reich’s documentary, it can be constures that economic inequality is multi-faceted. This implies that economic inequality encompassess the distribution of income as well as the distributiion of wealth. The former makes reference to how much money people make while the latter makes reference to the amount of resources owned. With this in mind, both income and wealth are disporportionately distributed within the larger society in the sense that more resources are in the hand of only a few people, whereas the majority of the population remains bombarded with daily economic struggles (Piketty, 2015).
There is literature to suppport the fact that the extent of wealth inequality in the U.S is greatly underreported in the media. Over the recent years, this inequality has become more severe than what many people may think. In fact, the top 1% in the U.S are said to hold more wealth than the entire middle-class. However, this is not to say that belonging to the 1% is a bad thing. Besides those who inheritied their fortunes, there are wealthy individuals who have made fortunes for themselves by making major innovations that have generally enhanced our living standards today, especially in the periods following the advent of the internet (Milanovic, 2016).
Still, there are some welathy individuals in our current society that engage in cronysim. This refers to cartels of wealthty people who have influence over the economy and politics and hence are able to seek taxation and regulatory advantages. Such selfishness and greed ensures the contniued proseprity of the top 1% and is in contravention of the ideals of shared prosperity (Piketty, 2015).
References
Milanovic, B. (2016). Global Inequaltiy: A New Approach for the Age of Globalizaztion. Harvard University Press.
Piketty, T. (2015). The Economics of Inequality. Harvard University Press.
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