My class just finished reading the Great Gatsby, and I have to find articles about class disparity in the U.S. in modern times and how it has changed since the roaring 20's. It was easy to find articles about how it is now (top 1% own 40% of the wealth, huge gap between upper and lower class, social mobility is low, etc.), but I can't find much about how it has changed. Right now, it seems to be about the same as it was in the 20's. Has there been change? Some possible topics that I thought of are: new vs. old money, social mobility, the american dream, and the gap between the rich and the poor.
The rough picture looks like this. Income inequality rises over the 1920s, declines sharply with the Depression and the resulting reduction of corporate profits and capital gains and then declines further through World War II and afterward reaching a historic low in the mid-1970s. Here there is a reversal and inequality increases again reaching a similar level to the 1920s by the 1990s.
