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The Pew Research Center reports that income inequality is at its highest point since 1928. Will it ever substantially improve? Not without a dramatic paradigm shift.

From 1979 to 2015, annual wages increased for the bottom 90 percent of Americans by 21 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. For the top 1.0 percent, the increase was 105 percent. For the top 0.1 percent, it was 339 percent.

Our system is based on the paradigm, as Professor Scott R. Sanders of Indiana University explains, of financial wealth being the highest good, with any constraint on the pursuit of money being bad. This means that “government regulation of business, industry, agriculture or commercial production and services must be resisted as an infringement on the free market.”  The corollary is, what’s good for those at the top is good for the nation.

The paradigm manifests in several ways, starting with last year’s Tax Cut and Jobs Act. The Tax Policy Center calculated that the largest tax cuts as a share of income go to taxpayers in the top 95th to 99th percentiles of income.

Both President Donald Trump and White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney loathe the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. After all, this is an agency, according to its website, “that makes sure banks, lenders, and other financial companies treat you (read consumers) fairly” and touts that it has recovered “$12.4 billion in relief for consumers.”

The same paradigm influences the justice system. Ohio passed legislation in 2004 that significantly limits damage awards in personal injury cases. The reasoning behind the bill was that “our tort system has caused bankruptcies, loss of jobs, and stifles innovation” and that Ohio businesses were falling further behind. No statistics were presented, and no consideration was given to how the bill would affect people who are injured by someone else’s negligence. The bill was promoted as being a “balanced plan,” even though it considered only the business community.

The debate over whether we should raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour always gets swallowed by concern for what bad things might follow. Of course, the decisions makers are make good salaries, but what about the married breadwinner with two kids who earns just $12 an hour? If we made it a priority to improve his plight and that of the 43 million American who live at the poverty level ($24,339 annual income for a family of four), the discussion would be much different. Instead of allowing the fear of consequences to determine what we should do, we would be analyzing how to raise wages while concurrently mitigating any negative effects.

But the wage gap is just one part of the problem. A larger one is looming. The loss of jobs due to technological advances poses to be an even larger threat to the financial well-being of many Americans. MIT academics Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee believe that technology is starting to destroy jobs faster than it creates them.

Job prospects are diminishing not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in the professional sector as well. We are starting to witness what Brynjolfsson and McAfee call the “great decoupling” — economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation.

Think about it. Bank tellers are becoming a vanishing breed. Amazon fills your orders with robots. You don’t need a sales clerk to buy clothes; a click of your computer mouse will do it. Between automation and globalization, the U.S. has lost millions of manufacturing jobs. My legal profession isn’t safe; research doesn’t require the same effort it required not many years ago. Soon we will have self-driving trucks.

If workers at the low end of the economic ladder are falling behind now, the problem will only get worse and for more people when more jobs start to disappear. And worse yet, the speed of change is increasing dramatically.

It doesn’t seem the people at the top care. But they’ll have to at some point.

[This post was published in The Columbus Dispatch on Sept. 25, 2018.]

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Jack D’Aurora writes for Considerthisbyjd.com

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Also published on Medium.