2/10/2018 Documentary explores the nation’s growing inequality | USC News

Documentary explores the nation’s growing inequality

Film looks at disparities in income

BY MARCH 6, 2014

U at the USC School of Social Work as part of the Visions and Voices arts and humanities initiative.

SC was one of 200 universities to recently screen Inequality for All, a documentary shown

“We’re here because we have a general interest in improving the world,” USC Associate Professor Ange-Marie Hancock said before the start of the film.

Hancock reiterated that a social worker’s purpose is to help people — especially the individuals who have been pushed to the back burner in the United States.

From the end of World War II until the late 1970s, income inequality was at its lowest while education rates and the number of labor unions were at their peak. Since then, income inequality has increased — a trend that falls directly in line with the decline of labor unions and accessibility of education, according to former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who appears in the film.

“For many, it’s a cross-generational poverty syndrome that we are stuck in,” said Cheryl Grills, a professor of psychology at Loyola Marymount University, during a panel discussion following the screening, noting that 42 percent of U.S. children born into poverty will remain there.

The film pointed out that as wages for the average worker flattened in the 1970s, an education was required to earn a better living. But as education became less accessible, it became more difficult for the average person to get the schooling needed to earn better wages. It’s part of what Reich called “The Vicious Cycle.”

“How do we make going to college affordable?” asked Renee Smith-Maddox, a clinical associate professor at the School of Social Work who helped bring the film to the school. “How do we make buying a home something everyone can do?”

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2/10/2018 Documentary explores the nation’s growing inequality | USC News

And yet, as the United States reaches a level of income inequality that rivals that of Uganda, the economy continues to grow, benefitting a small percentage of people. Reich makes a point to not demonize or criminalize the idea of being wealthy; rather, he noted that it is the way money is being spent that is problematic.

“It’s not that people are rich — it’s that they use their wealth to lobby,” he said.

Reich looked at the

case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The case led to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting political independent expenditures by corporations, associations or

concentration of wealth