workers a higher wage to reflect their higher productivity. This will lead to wage inequality, but without it, it would be hard to motivate workers” (Pettinger 1). In this situation, a place without income inequality would be not fair for the hard working people, but if the income inequality is too wide, it is not fair for the people who works normally. Tejvan Pettinger was taking a neutral standing, which shows the inequality is necessary for everyone to work hard and improve the society and for Capitalism. However, the system is not perfect enough. As time goes on, the first hard working generation people will become very rich and the inequality gap will expand. “So, for example, a rich person can buy up a number of foreclosed houses and rent them out to desperate tenants at ridiculously high rates. Then, each time rent is paid, the landlord becomes richer and the tenant becomes poorer, and inequalities in wealth grow” (Robertson & Leumer 1). That is how the capitalism system work. “Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords” (Sturm and Haan). Once the system begins, the first hard working generation people got a bag of gold first and then pass down to their descendants. The descendants born with money tend to have more opportunities than the people born without money because the rich people can get the best educations and health cares while the people who did not work hard are still worrying about their foods and shelters. “Compared to those of days past it is by and large more talented, better schooled, harder working (and more fabulously remunerated) and more diligent in its parental duties” (The Economist). However, the if the gap starts from the beginning of capitalism, it would not stop until there is a revolution or a set of new laws come out. “Inequality is indeed increasing almost everywhere in the postindustrial capitalist world” (Muller 2013). After the Industry revolution in America, the gap was wide too. It was shrink by a set of new laws and President Theodore Roosevelt. “In a recent New York Times op-ed article, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz theorized that capitalism does not inevitably produce inequalities in wealth Instead, he argued, today’s inequalities result from policy decisions made by politicians on all sorts of matters that affect people’s income: the tax structure that favors the rich, the bailout of the banks during the Great Recession, subsidies for rich farmers, cutting of food stamps, etc” (Robertson and Leumer 2014). There are some people still believe that the wide inequality gap is not produce by capitalism. In fact, capitalism born with it. Inequality is part of capitalism because it is a way to make the lazy people to work. Also the principle of capitalism is individuals operate the market without government’s involvement, but the politicians stepped in. That is another cause, but if there is no government involvement, the gap would be wider because the business peoples would do anything to maximize their profit and to survive in this competitive society. Even though some politicians are helping the rich people, there are politicians helping the poor people too. So, the politician is definitely not a direct cause to the wide inequality gap but a catalyst. According to the competition in the capitalism system, the demand of higher production chief executive officers increases, and then the wages of CEOs must be increasing. “The median American estimated that the CEO-to-worker pay-ratio was 30-to-1, and that ideally, it’d be 7-to-1. The reality? 354-to-1. Fifty years ago, it was 20-to-1” (Fitz 2015). As we see, the income gap was increasing by time. It is not the problem of politic, but the problem of the system. Time is running this system. The purpose of this research is find several resources to see their opinions or thinking about how capitalism expand the income and wealth inequality gap slowly and what are other side causes to the inequality. Basically, most of the people agree that the capitalism born with inequality and cannot maintain without it. In my own perspective, because the inequality comes with the system and then it expands because the system is not perfect. That is why when time goes on, the inequality is increasing. That is the major causes. Jan-Egbert Sturm and Jakob De Haan agree that too. In order to understand the problem thoroughly, we have to understand what is capitalism and what does it do to the economy and society.
And we have to find out do other capitalism nations have the same situation as United States. The wealth chart and data of other nations is needed to be read. If other capitalism nations also have a wide inequality gap, then we can clearly prove capitalism causes a wide inequality gap. The methodologies that should be used to analyze the relationship between the inequality gap and capitalism are to find the out the definition of capitalism, what does capitalism do, and search how many capitalism nations have a large inequality gap. We have to consider the time the country has practiced capitalism and how wide is the gap. Then we can conclude that capitalism is the real cause of a wide inequality gap. The whole concept of my proposal is surrounding the theme of American social study because the United States have convinced so many countries to practiced Capitalism since the cold war. Now, it has faced a problem, which is the wide inequality gap that has affected the nation economically, politically, and socially. The poor people in Silicon Valley cannot even support themselves, New York City’s subway has a lot of homeless peoples that have no jobs, the businessman like Donald Trump are trying to involve the politics, and people born in poor family is almost impossible to shift to the rich class. These all are big problems caused by
Capitalism. As we know, capitalism is a free market economy system, but also a system for the fittest to survive. This system is not perfect. It has pros and cons that can thrive the economy and can kill the poor people because rich sons always have more opportunities to succeed. Even though free market is good, but it can lead to a wide inequality gap. Thus, the problems will come. If there is a system that can provide inequality but not too wide. That would be the solution for all the unfairness. Maybe that system would be the advantage combinations of capitalism and communism. Anyway, we can conclude that capitalism is the cause of a wide income and wealth inequality gap.