SOCIETY

TERRITORY

Most countries have formal boundaries and territory that the world recognizes as theirs. However, a society’s boundaries don’t have to be geopolitical borders, such as the one between the United States and Canada. Instead, members of a society, as well as nonmembers, must recognize particular land as belonging to that society.

PLURALISM

The United States is a society composed of many groups of people, some of whom originally belonged to other societies. Sociologists consider the United States a Pluralistic Society, meaning it is built of many groups. As societies modernize, they attract people from countries where there may be economic hardship, political unrest, or religious persecution. Since the industrialized countries of the West were the first to modernize, these countries tend to be more pluralistic than countries in other parts of the world.

Many people came to the United States between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Fleeing poverty and religious persecution, these immigrants arrived in waves from Europe and Asia and helped create the pluralism that makes the United States unique.

PLURALISM IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Both cities and regions reflect pluralism in the United States. Most major American cities have areas in which people from particular backgrounds are concentrated, such as Little Italy in New York, Chinatown in San Francisco, and Little Havana in Miami. Regionally, people of Mexican descent tend to live in those states that border Mexico. Individuals of Cuban descent are concentrated in Florida. Spanish-speaking people from other Caribbean islands, such as Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, are more likely to live in the Northeast.

ASSIMILATION

Some practices that are common in other societies will inevitably offend or contradict the values and beliefs of the new society. Groups seeking to become part of a pluralistic society often have to give up many of their original traditions in order to fit in—a process known as Assimilation.

In pluralistic societies, groups do not have to give up all of their former beliefs and practices. Many groups within a pluralistic society retain their ethnic traditions.
Source: SparkNotes/Sociology/Society and Culture/

INCOME INEQUALITY

In the United States, the income gap between the rich and everyone else has been growing markedly, by every major statistical measure, for more than 30 years. 

Income includes the revenue streams from wages, salaries, interest on a savings account, dividends from shares of stock, rent, and profits from selling something for more than you paid for it. Unlike wealth statistics, income figures do not include the value of homes, stock, or other possessions. Income inequality refers to the extent to which income is distributed in an uneven manner among a population.

Income disparities are so pronounced that America’s top 10 percent now average more than nine times as much income as the bottom 90 percent, according to data analyzed by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Americans in the top 1 percent tower stunningly higher. They average over 39 times more income than the bottom 90 percent. But that gap pales in comparison to the divide between the nation’s top 0.1 percent and everyone else. Americans at this lofty level are taking in over 196 times the income of the bottom 90 percent.

The U.S. income divide has not always been as vast as it is today. In response to the staggering inequality of the Gilded Age in the early 1900s, social movements and progressive policymakers fought successfully to level down the top through fair taxation and level up the bottom through increased unionization and other reforms. But beginning in the 1970s, these levelers started to erode and the country returned to extreme levels of inequality. According to data analyzed by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, the ratio between the top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent reached Gilded Age levels in the years preceding the 2008 financial crisis.

Over the past five decades, the top 1 percent of American earners have nearly doubled their share of national income, according to Saez’s analysis. Meanwhile, the official poverty rate for all U.S. families from the Census Bureau has merely inched up and down. The official poverty rate understates the number of people in the world’s richest country who have trouble making ends meet. An estimated 40 percent of the total U.S. population (140 million people) are either poor or low-income.

The nation’s highest 0.01 percent and 0.1 percent of income-earners have seen their incomes rise much faster than the rest of the top 1 percent in recent decades. Both of these ultra-rich groups saw their incomes drop immediately after the financial crashes of 1929 and 2008, but they had a much swifter recovery after the more recent crisis. Income concentration today is as extreme as it was during the “Roaring Twenties.”

The Congressional Budget Office defines before-tax income as “market income plus government transfers,” or, quite simply, how much income a person makes counting government social assistance. Analysts have a number of ways to define income. But they all tell the same story: The top 1 percent of U.S. earners take home a disproportionate amount of income compared to even the nation’s highest fifth of earners. CBO data indicates that the top 1 percent earns 85 times as much as the bottom 20 percent.

Since 1979, the before-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of America’s households have increased more nearly seven times faster than bottom 20 percent incomes, according to CBO analysis.

The Congressional Budget Office defines after-tax income as “before-tax income minus federal taxes.” After taxes, top 1 percent incomes were already increasing faster than for other Americans, according to their data. This gap will likely grow even wider as a result of the 2017 Republican tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the richest 1 percent of Americans are expected to receive 27 percent of the benefits of the tax cuts in 2020.

The higher the U.S. income group, IRS data shows, the larger the share of income derived from investment profits. By contrast, Americans who are not among the ultra-rich get the vast majority of their income from wages and salaries. This disparity has contributed significantly to increasing inequality because of the preferential tax treatment of long-term capital gains. Currently, the top marginal tax rate for the richest Americans is 37 percent, while the top rate for long-term capital gains is just 20 percent.

WAGE INEQUALITY

"The issue of pay inequality is really important because experts say it will take 40 years for that gap to close. We don't have 40 years to wait”. -Patricia Arquette