California is big and there is a lot of money here. Our economy output has surpassed 4 and a half trillion dollars and we have the 4th largest economy in the world. But our state is also one of the most unequal states in the country, with extreme disparities between people living in poverty and those at the top.
In the Bay Area, you can find encampments of unhoused people a short distance from multimillion dollar homes. As parents, it’s hard to even begin to explain the different worlds of poverty and wealth that are a regular backdrop to our kids everyday lives. Parents like Cristina Mora, who's a UC Berkeley professor of Sociology, and she decided to explore these questions about inequality with her colleague Tianna Paschel associate professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies.
Together they conducted a survey of over six thousand residents and they sat for one hundred in-depth interviews to find out why Californians are “aware of inequality but not more angry about it.” They published their findings in their book “Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide.”
Crosscurrents host Hana Baba spoke with Cristina and Tianna about why income inequality is on the rise in California, and the perils of accepting it.
