Talking Points - Income Inequality

Is income inequality bad? First two questions:

1. What does income inequality mean?
2. Why is income inequality bad?

"In January, scholars from Harvard and University of California, Berkeley bolstered the Treasury economists' conclusions. Parsing data from the 1950s and 1970s, the researchers, who are involved with The Equality of Opportunity Project, reported that "measures of social mobility have remained stable over the second half of the twentieth century in the United States." The researchers also found that income inequality has indeed increased in the United States, which means that "the rungs on the income ladder have grown further apart." Nevertheless, "children's chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not changed."

What factors retard upward income mobility? Among other things, being located in the southeastern United States, greater residential segregation by race and ethnicity, poor public schools, residing in areas with lower social capital, and living in neighborhoods with higher percentages of single-parent families." - Reason