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Causes Of Income Inequality

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Robert Higgs once said, “A society with greater income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.” When people think of income inequality, they picture poverty and people not having basic necessities. However, income inequality is not just associated with the poor. Income inequality is strongly affected by educational attainment, technology, and gender. One of the reasons for income inequality is education. The more education one has, the greater their possibility of making a higher income. Based on information provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “earnings increase and unemployment decreases as educational attainment rises” (Vilario 2016).
Figure 1 (Earnings and unemployment rates by educational attainment)
As shown in Figure 1,people with a professional degree have the lowest rate of unemployment at 1.5 percent, while people with less than a high school diploma have an unemployment rate of 8.0 percent. The study also shows that the unemployment rate for those with a just a high school diploma is 2.5 percent higher than those who have earned a Bachelor’s degree. Those who obtain a professional degree have weekly earnings of $1237 more than those that obtained less than a high school diploma.
Having more education does not guarantee that one will have a higher salary than someone who has less than a year’s worth of post secondary education. However, it can allow a person to prosper within a

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