Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

We have extreme inequality in America, and it’s getting worse

Mark Zuckerberg holding a pair of glasses

Mark Zuckerberg, who is now worth more than $200 billion, shows off new wearabel tech at the Meta Connect developer conference in September.

Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images

Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.

Bloomberg recently reported that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg is now worth over $200 billion. He’s not alone. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and LVMH founder Bernard Arnault are also worth north of $200 billion.

The news is a searing reminder of the uneven distribution of wealth in America. In the same country as Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk reside millions of people without a reliable source of food. (Arnault lives in France.) Redistributing just a small portion of the richest Americans’ wealth could alleviate tremendous human suffering.


The problem is getting worse with time. According to Forbes magazine, “In 1987, the [world’s] 140 billionaires had an aggregate net worth of $295 billion.” But now, in 2024, there are “more billionaires than ever: 2,781 in all, 141 more than last year and 26 more than the record set in 2021. They’re richer than ever, worth $14.2 trillion in aggregate, up by $2 trillion from 2023 and $1.1 trillion above the previous record, also set in 2021.”

Forbes continued: “Much of the gains come from the top 20, who added a combined $700 billion in wealth since 2023, and from the U.S., which now boasts a record 813 billionaires worth a combined $5.7 trillion.”

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

What could that vast wealth do? Looking globally, Oxfam International recently explained that $1.7 trillion is “enough to lift two billion people out of poverty.” So just a fraction of the wealth of a small number of people could bring billions out of poverty.

The problem, though, isn’t just the top 0.1 percent. As Pew Research notes, America’s upper class is getting richer as its middle class is getting smaller: “The growth in income in recent decades has tilted to upper-income households. At the same time, the U.S. middle class, which once comprised the clear majority of Americans, is shrinking. Thus, a greater share of the nation’s aggregate income is now going to upper-income households and the share going to middle- and lower-income households is falling. The share of American adults who live in middle-income households has decreased from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019.”

America’s inequality, moreover, is markedly worse than other wealthy nations. The Gini coefficient is a common measure of a country’s inequality. It uses a scale of 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (complete inequality). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2017, “the Gini coefficient in the U.S. stood at 0.434.” This number “was higher than in any other of the G-7 countries, in which the Gini ranged from 0.326 in France to 0.392 in the UK, and inching closer to the level of inequality observed in India (0.495).”

There are many reasons for this inequality. Among them: technological automation, inherited wealth, lax corporate regulation, liberal trade policies, outsourced labor, insufficient taxation and broken public schools. Some inequality, of course, is also driven by individual choice (people electing to spend time on less-lucrative activities) and work ethic (some people work more than others).

And, importantly, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with people getting rich. Some amount of inequality should even be encouraged. Hard work and ingenuity should be rewarded, as wealth must be created in order to be redistributed. And high-profile business successes motivate others to innovate and take risks that improve society at large.

But an excessive amount of inequality — see Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk — allows large-scale human suffering to go needlessly unaddressed. This isn't just unfair. As the International Monetary Fund explained, it has widespread societal consequences: “growing inequality breeds social resentment and generates political instability. It also fuels populist, protectionist, and anti-globalization sentiments.”

These problems aren't surprising or complicated. They’re obvious consequences of a deeply flawed economic system. The same nation simply shouldn’t have a few jackpot winners hoarding billions and, at the same time, tens of millions struggling to get by.

Read More

Business professional watching stocks go down.
Getty Images, Bartolome Ozonas

The White House Is Booming, the Boardroom Is Panicking

The Confidence Collapse

Consumer confidence is plummeting—and that was before the latest Wall Street selloffs.

Keep ReadingShow less
Project 2025: Trump Admin Tries to Curb the FTC's Corporate Oversight

The Federal Trade Commission building.

Getty Images, Greggory DiSalvo

Project 2025: Trump Admin Tries to Curb the FTC's Corporate Oversight

In the first few weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump signed a series of controversial executive orders that are designed to exert tight control over 19 federal agencies that were established decades ago by Congress to act independently of the president. Since then, the Trump administration has attempted to methodically remove the independence of the Federal Election Commission, National Labor Relations Board, Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and other agencies.

The latest regulatory agency in the presidential crosshairs is one of the most important: the corporate watchdog Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Just recently, the White House mounted a takeover of the FTC by firing the only two Democratic commissioners on the five-person commission and politicizing its bipartisan regulatory oversight.

Keep ReadingShow less
USA China trade war and American tariffs as opposing cargo freight containers in conflict as an economic and diplomatic dispute over import and exports concept as a 3D illustration.
Are Trump's tariffs good for the economy or will they increase prices?
wildpixel/Getty Images

Just the Facts: United States Vs. China Tariff War


What tariffs did the United States impose on China on April 2nd?

On April 2, 2025, President Donald Trump announced a series of tariffs, including a 10% universal tariff on all imports, with additional country-specific rates. For China, an additional 34% tariff was imposed.

Keep ReadingShow less
Just the Facts:  Has Trump Made Stock Market Volatility Great Again?

A person viewing stock market trends on their phone.

Getty Images, manusapon kasosod

Just the Facts: Has Trump Made Stock Market Volatility Great Again?

Our ongoing series, “Just the Facts,” strives to approach news stories with both an open mind and skepticism, so we may present our readers with a broad spectrum of viewpoints through diligent research and critical thinking. As best we can, we look to remove personal bias from our reporting and seek a variety of perspectives in both our news gathering and selection of opinion pieces.

Has the stock market been more volatile than usual since Trump was inaugurated this January?

Keep ReadingShow less