Christianity & Culture
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Just a thought
Fighting to Make Up Monya A. Stubbs
E
conomist Raghuram G. Rajan argues in his recent book, Fault Lines, that the rising income inequality in the United States served as a major factor in our current economic crisis. However, the inequality is not simply between the 1-percentile income earners and the 99-percentile income earners. Rather, the discrepancy is also in the 90/50 income distribution split where, since the 1980s, the “wages of workers at the 90th percentile of the wage distribution in the United States—such as office managers—have grown much faster than the wage of the 50th percentile worker (the median worker)—typically factory workers and office assistants.”1 Rajan recognizes that numerous factors contribute to the growth in the 90/50 differential. However, the primary factor is poor education. The technological progress experienced in the United States over the past three decades requires a workforce with a broader knowledge base and deeper skill-sets. Fewer and fewer viable job options are available for people without an undergraduate degree, and in many instances, even for office workers, an undergraduate degree is barely 1. Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2010), 8.
Monya Stubbs is associate professor of New Testament at Austin Seminary.
An ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Stubbs is the author of A Contextual Introduction to the Gospel of Matthew and its Readings (coauthor, Abingdon Press, 2003). Her teaching interests include a wide range of New Testament subjects, as well as African-American Christianity, theological themes in contemporary novels, theology and economy, and the Book of Job.
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