Wilkinson Income Inequality Analysis

After watching Wilkinson’s lecture on income inequality, my view on income differences and social problems definitely changed. For years, I have looked at income inequality on a global perspective. That national income per head could be an accurate representation of the income status for each country. After Wilkinson compared “Income Inequality vs. Index of Health and Social Problems” and “Gross National Income per Head vs. Index of Health and Social Problems,” I realized how different it was. Wilkinson was indeed right--the reason why we don’t see these changes on the much larger scale is because we have not fixed the problems that lie on a smaller scale. For someone who is in the lower middle class, I can definitely see the problems that

After seeing Japan as the country with the smallest income gap and USA being one of the countries with the largest, I thought that the idea of collectivism vs. individualism could be a factor. Asian countries like Japan had a collectivistic mindset and valued the work of everyone rather than individuals climbing to the top. However, this idea was ruled out since Singapore was ranked as one of the countries with the highest income gap. This does not mean that social mindsets do not have an effect. Wilkinson did mention the psychosocial effects of inequality. When our status or self-esteem is highly valued, it “drives the consumerism” and makes us distant from our peers—hence widening the gap we see

A common argument is that one’s wealth depends on how much they are working. If they worked hard to receive all of their earnings, they should have the right to keep it all—no matter how much or how little they made. This leads to the idea that such a strategy is a form of “theft” because we are taking money from the “rich” and giving it to the poor. Eventually this constant giving may lead to people choosing to be “lazy” and not working to maintain wealth. This could result to the whole society getting poorer because the lower class is not working hard enough to acquire the income