Wealth Inequality

Sociologists and Society alike often pinpoint race as the principal factor in determining an individual's future success. What is painfully obvious, however, is that the old parameters for determining future success are incredibly outdated; and could use a serious overhaul. While racism is still very much alive in modern day America, growing wealth inequality has created a serious gap between poor and affluent children, a gap so big that social class is now a far better predictor of one's future success. Under the status quo, policies such as Affirmative Action promote the view that one's race is associated with certain advantages. While this is certainly true, it's hard to argue that a poor white child has an advantage over a poor black child …show more content…
The advantages that the nations most affluent children enjoy, when it comes to education, are clear. Schools in affluent areas have larger tax bases, both due to more commercial development, and higher property values. Affluent citizens also tend to live in suburbs, where the small population means less strain on municipal resources. Furthermore, since affluence is achieved through education the most affluent students have a significant head start on their poorest peers. There is also a sizeable difference between middle-class students and their poorest peers. The same report by the Economic Policy Institute claims that the reading and math skills advantages of children in the middle of the income distribution relative to the lowest income group are roughly half as large as advantages of high-income children to the lowest income group. This gap between middle income and lower income children is the most troublesome, as it makes social mobility almost unachievable for America's poorest citizens. In the past, the wide range of middle-class incomes made social mobility and even intergenerational …show more content…
A difference in parenting styles, which are certainly affected by affluence, is creating a class-based parenting gap. Renowned political scientist Robert Putnam was one of the first scholars to observe this phenomenon. “Increasingly,” according to Putnam, “parents from different different social classes are doing very different things to and for their kids, with massively consequential results." "The ubiquitous correlation between poverty and child development," Putnam writes, "is, in fact, largely explained by differences in parenting styles, including cognitive stimulation (such as frequency of reading) and social engagement (such as involvement in extracurricular activities)." The poorest americans have to choose between putting food on the table, or spending time with their children and the results of this choice are clear. Poor children are spending less time with their parents and are thus at a serious disadvantage by the time they reach kindergarten. Researcher Richard Reeves studied the effects of this and published his results in Democracy Journal. He finds: “children in families on welfare heard about 600 words per hour, working-class children heard 1,200 words, while children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By the age of three, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words at home than one from a professional family.” Affluent children also grow up in more stable homes,

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