1140 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises
The Occupy Movement
The problem of inequality burst into public discussion in 2011. On Septem-
ber 17, a few dozen young protesters unrolled sleeping bags in Zuccotti Park,
in the heart of New York City’s financial district. They vowed to remain— to
Occupy Wall Street as they put it— as a protest against growing economic
inequality, declining opportunity, and malfeasance by the banks.
Over the next few weeks, hundreds of people camped out in the park and
thousands took part in rallies organized by the Occupy movement. Similar
encampments sprang up in cities across the country. Using social media and
the Internet, the Occupy movement spread its message far and wide. Although
the technology was new, the movement bore some resemblance to previous
efforts at social change, including the sit- down strikes of the 1930s and the civil
disobedience of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. In the spring
of 2012, public authorities began to evict the protesters and the movement
seemed to dissipate. But its language, especially the charge that “the 1 per-
cent” (the very richest Americans) dominated political and economic life, had
entered the political vocabulary. The Occupy movement tapped into a wide-
spread feeling of alienation, especially among the young, a sense that society’s
rules have been fixed in favor of those at the top.
And it spurred a movement among low- paid workers, especially in fast-
food establishments, demanding a rise in the hourly minimum wage. States
and cities are allowed to establish higher minimum- wage rates than the fed-
eral government and many do so, although some large states, including Texas,
Florida, and Pennsylvania, make no such provision. In 2014, Seattle and Los
Angeles raised their minimums to $15 per hour. New York State followed in
2015 by announcing a $15 minimum for workers in fast- food restaurants. The
vast University of California system also adopted $15 as the minimum wage for
all nonacademic workers on its campuses. What began as a quixotic movement
of the least empowered workers against some of the country’s most prominent
corporations had achieved some remarkable successes.
Rising inequality had profound social consequences. The United States was
by far the world’s most unequal developed economy. In a variety of social sta-
tistics, it was falling further and further behind other advanced countries. More
than one- fifth of American children lived in poverty in 2015, the highest figure
in the industrialized world. In 1980, the United States ranked thirteenth among
advanced countries in life expectancy at birth; in 2015 it ranked twenty- ninth.
In a reversal of the historic pattern, the size of the American middle class con-
tinued to shrink, average family income and the number of low- income stu-
dents graduating from college trailed that of several other countries, and social
mobility— the opportunity for people to move up the economic ladder— stood
at a lower level in the United States than in western Europe.