income
Income inequality in the United States remained relatively stable for a period of nearly forty years. Beginning in the 1970's, however, this period of stability ended, as the first signs of widening income inequality became apparent. Over the course of the 1970's and 1980's, an increasingly clear trend toward greater income inequality emerged. By the end of the 1980's, the top 20 percent of workers were receiving the largest share of income ever recorded by government figures, and the bottom three fifths were receiving the lowest shares ever recorded. This trend has continued into the 1990's and currently shows no signs of decline. When the indicators of growing inequality were first observed in the 1970's, some researchers argued that the effects were merely temporary artifacts of short-term labor market disturbances. By the end of the 1980's, however, a long-term trend towards increasing inequality had clearly emerged, pointing instead to inflexible changes in the occupational
At the same time, long-run changes in living arrangements have taken place that tends to provoke differences in household incomes. For example, divorces and separations, births out of wedlock, and the increasing age at first marriage have led to a shift away from married-couple households and toward single-parent and non-family households, which typically have lower incomes. Also, the increasing tendency over the period for men with higher-than-average earnings to marry women with higher-than-average earnings has contributed to widening gap between high-income and low-income households. Two dominant bodies of thought emerged around the issue: the "job-skill mismatch" thesis and the "polarization" thesis. Polarization theorists, on the other hand, believe that the rise in inequality is permanent, a result of the shift to a service-based economy. This vision of the post-industrial economy is characteristically polarized. The problem according to these theorists, is the type of jobs being generated in the
Some common words found in the essay are:
Inequality Income, income inequality, occupational structure, post-industrial economy, trend towards, trend towards increasing, occupational structure occupational, unskilled workers, higher-than-average earnings, less-educated workers, polarization theorists, real wage, structure occupational,
Approximate Word count = 685
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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