Tools for Narrowing the Great Divide
Interested in conducting a workshop on extreme inequality for your community group, local union, or religious congregation? Looking for materials that can help you give an inequality-related presentation? Or just want to get yourself up to speed on growing great divide between the super-rich and everyone else?
Just browse around this Tools section. Please check back regularly. We’ll be adding new aids for understanding extreme inequality on a regular basis.
A Landmark Nation Magazine Special Issue
Income and wealth in the United States have been concentrating, at an incredibly rapid rate, for nearly three decades now. Yet that concentration seldom comes across, in the nation’s media or politics, as something incredibly important.
The Nation, one of the nation’s top weekly political journals, has just published a special issue that may help change that. The June 30 Nation spotlights extreme inequality that a depth — and a brio — that hasn’t been seen in the American media since super-sized fortunes first started reappearing on the American scene in the 1980s.
This special Nation issue, a collaboration between the magazine and the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., ranges widely over America’s deeply unequal contemporary landscape, from the Park Avenue headquarters of one of New York’s most powerful hedge funds to the gorgeous mountain vistas of Driggs, Idaho, a small town where average-income people can no longer afford, as author Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, “to wake up to the same scenery” that rich people enjoy.
The issue features eye-opening stats on just how wide our current gap between the super-rich and everyone else has become — and stats even more dramatic on the mammoth gap between America’s richest today and America’s far less rich of 50 years ago.
Workshops
United for a Fair Economy, a Boston-based national group that has been doing popular education around inequality issues since the mid 1990s, offers a variety of workshop guides you can download free from the UFE Web presence.
Among the workshop topics now available from UFE:
- The Growing Divide
- Closing the Racial Wealth Divide
- Fair Taxes for All
- War and the Economy
- High Pay, Low Pay, Fair Pay!
- Immigration and the Economy
Computer-Based Presentations
A century ago, Americans concerned about inequality did successful battle against plutocracy with distinctly low-tech tools. But times have changed, and straightforward orations these days leave audiences distinctly underwhelmed. The graphic-rich PowerPoint presentations listed below can help stimulate vital discussions about the price we pay for tolerating severe inequalities in income and wealth.
We have available here PDFs of these presentations. If you’re interested in receiving a copy in a customizable PowerPoint format, just send us an email request.
Extreme Inequality: Starting a Strategic Conversation
Originally prepared July 2007. Updated June 2008.
How unequal have we become in the United States? Is a significantly more equal United States a reasonable goal, or are we doomed to wander forever in Ronald Reagan’s America? This presentation examines why progressives a century ago believed we need to fight both the absence of wealth, or poverty, and its concentration.
Download a PDF of this presentation
Long Live the Statistical Middle Class!
Originally prepared June 2008.
Concepts like “working class” and “middle class” come loaded with historical and cultural baggage that sometimes diverts attention from the real prize that advocates for social decency ought to be seeking: a relatively equal distribution of income and wealth. The more people in a society who share similar economic circumstances, this presentation points out, the better the social outcomes.
Download a PDF of this presentation
