Speaker: Janet Gornick
Event: The 48th Commencement Address for The Graduate Center
Excerpt:
Some extraordinary events have unfolded in this country since the Graduate Center community gathered for its last commencement. Shortly after the academic year began—on September 17, 2011—a group of activists gathered in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, launching the Occupy Wall Street movement, a movement that quickly spread from coast to coast.
The leaders of Occupy Wall Street have famously and deliberately avoided laying out specific demands, especially vis-à-vis the government. The movement’s refusal to nail down demands was clarified for me on my first visit to Zuccotti Park, when I was greeted by a sign that read: “We’re here, we’re unclear, get used to it!” In the end, that strategy—with its evident strengths and weaknesses—has made identifying the movement’s effects a difficult exercise.
But one consequence is indisputable: The Occupy movement has cast a bright and angry light on income inequality in the United States. And that light has catalyzed an intense national conversation, one that has pushed into relief at least one uncontested fact: Income inequality in the U.S. is greater than in many other wealthy countries. The Luxembourg Income Study—an organization that produces cross-nationally comparable data—recently assessed 27 affluent countries; their data revealed that, among these countries, the U.S. has the highest level of income inequality.
This Occupy-inspired conversation about inequality started immediately and it grew quickly. Between September and November of last year, references to income inequality in the national media increased by a factor of five. In December, President Obama, speaking in Osawatomie, Kansas, called for a heightened response to income inequality in the U.S.: “This kind of gaping inequality,” he said, “gives lie to the promise at the very heart of America.” The Occupy movement has forced a response from Republican leaders as well; all of the GOP presidential candidates served up populist claims, as they too attempted to court the newly identified “ninety-nine-percent.”
For those of us concerned about economic inequality in the U.S., this explosion of attention is more than welcome. But it is also the case that much of what has been claimed—to some extent on both the right and the left—is nonsense at worst, incomplete at best.