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Welcome to the Saturday edition of The Conversation U.S.’s Daily newsletter.
America is home to the largest number of billionaires in the world – about 1,000 – while close to 36 million people live below the poverty line. What does this say about Americans’ acceptance of such stark inequality?
“It would be easy to assume that most people accept it as fair – but they don’t,” writes Jen Cole Wright, professor of psychology at the College of Charleston.
Yet Americans have been reluctant to support higher wealth taxes or limits on wealth accumulation. As Wright argues, moral judgments often involve balancing “two things that pull against each other.” Extreme wealth lies on one such “moral fault line” – deciding between preserving the American Dream and preventing wealth from becoming a source of limitless power.
The challenge, she argues, is not to be less protective of what people earn or their right to earn it, but to promote a public conversation “grounded in an accurate understanding of how extreme wealth, while benefiting a few, can substantively harm everyone else.”
This week we also liked stories on why fossil fuel prices are likely to stay high in the foreseeable future, why a federal research funding plan could undermine the system that made the U.S. a science superpower, and how Spokane’s mass evacuation drill paid off during recent wildfires.
