Robert Reich: Wealth Inequality

Pause the video at 5:30; it's a very interesting graph. It bottoms out around 1970, when I was 22. The world looked bright: I had no qualms about quitting university. Lots of my tradesmen friends had a car, a boat, and a cabin at the lake. CEOs were paid about 30 times as much as their employees. But it was all downhill from there, as the graph climbed steadily higher. In 2020, CEOs were paid 350 times as much as their employees. Real estate prices have skyrocketed. The outlook for a young person just starting out looks bleak to me.

728 billionaires hold more wealth than half of American households. If that doesn’t tell you we’re in a second Gilded Age, I don’t know what will.

It can be easy to feel discouraged, but the first Gilded Age teaches us lessons on how we can fight back. Let me explain. pic.twitter.com/2gXK8IQ4ad

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) November 10, 2023