Feb
24
Post #4 Income inequality- Nicholas Lee
February 24, 2015 | Leave a Comment
Manhattan NY is one of the richest places in the country but it is also one of the most severe when it comes to income inequality. Nicole Gelina’s article “What the Rich Give to New York” highlights this disparity and does not sugarcoat it when she says “New York’s top 1 percent took in a full 36.5 percent of the city’s earnings—more than the bottom 80 percent put together, but she does provide a very interesting perspective on the benefit of having all these wealthy people living in New York City as it seems to benefit all of us.
I found Nicole Gelina’s article very interesting in both her evidence and the viewpoint she took in her stance of how the extremely wealth actually benefit the city. This is opposed to the wealthy depicted as usually causing harm and being portrayed negatively. It was interesting to hear Nicole draw evidence for her claims from not just one source but from many, weather it be the improvement of education, transit or cultural activities around the city.
She also brought up a very interesting point that weather we like it or not, a lot of these anti-poverty, educational enrichment programs, and other social benefit programs that many students take advantage of aren’t even payed by the government but instead are funded privately through the donations of wealthy individuals and the part that is government funded is funded mostly from the tax money of the extremely wealthy. One example I can think of is our own Macaulay Honors Program, which was named after William E. Macaulay, a CUNY alimni who donated $30 million to the CUNY Honors College (as it was known at the time).
Although, income inequality in my opinion is still a very serious issue in terms of equal opportunities for everyone, I still found this article very interesting on the stance it took and the points the author made. It almost sounded like “trickle down economics,” which is the idea that tax breaks for the rich and other economic benefits for the upper class will benefit all of society. Although this idea and method of thinking has gotten much criticism from the news lately, it seems for a second from this article that this idea might actually just work to an extent.
As far as the other two articles that we read, I also thought they were very interesting and support our already assumptions we had on the city. Yes we know there is a severe income inequality in the city but to put that data into visual graphs was quite moving. It was interesting to see how the average median income for the lower 20% of the population has stayed relatively stagnant in the last quarter century but the income for the upper 1% has increased significantly. The only thing I do question about those data is the measurements/data they are using and basing these graphs on and the scales. Obviously the writers of this article are trying to convey a message to us so I am wondering if these visual representations are actually accurate or if they are distorted in anyway to emphasize the point they are trying to make.
The last article I read was the one about the New York Subways. Like the 2nd article stated above, it was very interesting to see this visual representation, and it reinforced my previous knowledge and assumptions of income inequality that the poorer neighborhoods would probably be lower and the richer neighborhoods in manhattan would be higher on the chart. Naturally, I had to check where my own neighborhood falls on the graph and I was very surprised to see that the median income in my area is one of the lowest in the city compared to manhattan. I found this interesting because I never would have suspected this having lived here my whole life. Personally, I and my friends who live around here consider ourselves middle class so it was interesting that we were listed so low. I guess compared to Manhattan, we really are considered pinpricks and the wealth inequality is real after all.
