Social Class And Income Inequality

Kathleen Sussek
Intro to Sociology
Web Quest #2

Social class is more than just how much money you have, it’s also the clothes you wear, the school you attend, the home you live in and the car you drive. What social class you belong to has a very large impact on how you interact with others. People from lower classes have a different way of thinking about the world. Lower class people have to depend on others more and are much better at reading others emotions where as upper-class people don’t read others emotions well and tend to hoard resources. Upper-class people also are not as generous as they could be.

The ability to rise in social class has been an American Dream but studies have found that when people rise in wealth they
The Gini index is a way that we measure the extent to which the distribution of income. The Gini index is a measurement of the income distribution of a country’s residents. This number, which ranges from 0 to 1, is based on residents’ net income. This number helps us to define the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest. A 0 represents an economy with perfect equality while a 1 represents a perfect inequality.

Do not mistake the measurement of income distribution with the measurement of wealth. A country that is wealthy may have the same Gini score as a poorer country. The United States has a Gini score of 0.45 and ranks near the extreme end of the inequality scale. The countries with comparable inequality scores are Madagascar, Ecuador, Rwanda and Cameroon. A number of those countries are currently embroiled in or emerging from destabilizing conflicts. Some of those conflicts have derived from inequality. With the level of inequality in the United States, I could see this becoming a destabilizing conflict
Helath and wealth have always been closely related. In the early years, you didn’t have access to a doctor if you didn’t have wealth. Same seems to be happening these days as well. Even though we as a society have gained in our wealth, we still have a large chunk of our population that goes without healthcare. Studies have shown that wealthier people live longer than poorer citizens. The upper-class of society have healthcare more available because they have the funds to pay for it. Myself as a middle-class citizen will tell you that while I do have health insurance, I don’t have great health insurance and that deters me from going to the doctor. The new norm when it come to health insurance is companies offering high deductible insurance plans. That means that families now have a huge, sometimes 8-10 thousand dollar deductible to meet, before their health insurance pays anything. I don’t know about you but I don’t have thousands of dollars just laying around to pay my medical bills. What I find worse than that is the fact that I work hard, have a good job and really crappy insurance, you take someone of a lower-class who’s able to qualify for a state run program and you find that they are more likely to go to the doctor for a medical issue and fill a prescription than a middle-class citizen. My thoughts are that the lower-class and upper-class have better health than the