WEALTH INEQUALITY

Wealth inequality refers to the unequal distribution of wealth around the world. In our current capitalistic society, and in the world at large, a small handful of individuals control the majority of the world’s wealth.

 

As of February 2017, the world’s six richest men have as much wealth as 50% of the world’s population combined, and four out of the six are American (Buchhei). The wage gap continues to widen as the richest members of society accrue more and more wealth while the poorest members get poorer. This issue came to a head in 2011, with the Occupy Wall Street movement, which eventually became an international protest against economic inequality. The Occupy slogan, “We are the 99%,” refers to the unequal wealth distribution between the top 1% and the remaining 99%. The slogan took inspiration from the economist Joseph Stiglitz’s article, “Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%.” In it, Stiglitz attacks the 1% for actively seeking to maintain their disproportionate share of wealth by supporting policies in their own best interests while rejecting those that would vastly improve the lives of the 99% below them. Stiglitz says it best in his closing paragraph:

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Extreme wealth inequality destroys the societies in which they are produced, and lead to worlds like the one in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

 

Lauren Olamina lives in a state of chaos following the economic and societal collapse of the United States. This projection of the future isn’t far-fetched, as it’s just the natural progression of our own society if the current level of wealth inequality is not addressed and reversed. In Lauren’s society, there is a small wealthy class, a rapidly declining middle/working class, and a large, ever-increasing lower class. The wealthy have access to necessities like food and water, as well as to protections against the more desperate members of the lower classes. They also have the means to afford the services of the police and fire departments. The wealthiest are safe from the conditions that ravage the lower and middle classes. Working class citizens must band together in communities to help protect one another, like Robledo. But even these communities aren’t safe, with the constant attacks from the outside for their perceived “wealth.” Meanwhile, the truly wealthy thrive in their walled off estates and enclaves.  

 

The government in this distant future, like our own government today, only exacerbates the problem. They put in policies that help corporations (read: the wealthy) earn more money in exploiting the lower classes. Near the beginning of the novel, President-Elect Donner shares his plan to “get laws changed, suspend ‘overly restrictive’ minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws for those employers willing to take on homeless employees and provide them with training and adequate room and board” (Butler 34).

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We later see this plan put into action with the emergence of corporate-owned communities like Olivar. Lauren’s father sees these communities as a new form of slavery, and indeed that’s what they become. We get a better understanding of the abuses of such corporations with Emery. The poor workers cannot afford to live in the communities on the wages offered, and fall into a debt from which they can’t escape, and become modern-day debt slaves. Meanwhile the rich benefit from free labor.

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Our current society may not be as stratified as that of Lauren Olamina’s, but with the rich continuing to get richer, the poor continuing to get poorer, and the government’s ambivalence to the problem and unwillingness to fix it, this could one day be our reality.