#96 - Does Income Inequality Impair The American Dream?

Open to Debate

Education, News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2014

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Income inequality has been on the rise for decades. In the last 30 years, the wages of the top 1% have grown by 154%, while the bottom 90% has seen growth of only 17%. As the rungs of the economic ladder move further and further apart, conventional wisdom says that it will become much more difficult to climb them. Opportunities for upward mobility—the American dream—will disappear as the deck becomes stacked against the middle class and the poor. But others see inequality as a positive, a sign of a dynamic and robust economy that, in the end, helps everyone. And contrary to public opinion, mobility has remained stable over the past few decades. If the American dream is dying, is it the result of income inequality? Or is disparity in income a red herring where more complex issues are at play? The Debaters are Elise Gould, Edward Conard, Nick Hanauer, and Scott Winship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Kraken Pro with all new trading features and a fully customizable
0:06.0	interface.
0:07.0	It's Kraken's most powerful crypto trading platform.
0:09.6	Well, ever.
0:10.6	Head to pro.krakken.com and trade like a pro.
0:13.8	Cryptocurrencies are unregulated in the UK.
0:16.0	Prophies may be subject to capsule gains tax and the value of cryptocurrencies can go down
0:19.6	or up.
0:21.6	Thanks for listening to Intelligent Squared US.
0:24.2	Shall we play a game?
0:25.4	Sorry for the 80s flashback there.
0:27.3	But for word games, puzzles and trivia of all sorts right now, check out Ask Me Another.
0:33.0	Can you do math at the movies?
0:34.4	Do you know what it means to jump the shark?
0:36.7	Can you name commercial jingles, sung in Italian?
0:40.2	Find out by listening to Ask Me Another on iTunes under podcasts.
0:44.6	Hello again from Intelligent Squared US.
0:49.6	I'm John Donovan.
0:50.9	We use the word dream sometimes to be an almost completely opposite things.
0:55.0	We use dream to describe an aspiration for something that can be if we try hard enough,
1:00.7	dream a little dream, I have a dream.
1:03.4	But we also use it in the opposite way to describe something that is so impossible together
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Open to Debate, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Open to Debate and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.