This TED Talk is an interesting overview of studies showing that having more resources and advantage may make people less empathetic and more dominant, even attributing their success to personal actions over circumstance.
It also asserts that economic inequality causes detriment in various social and political ways, even obesity, though I question both causation and the accuracy of correlation. But the argument seems sincerely and non-accusatory, and gives us hope at the very end …
The video concludes with anecdotes of contradiction, where the wealthy have chosen to share benefit for all:
Bill Gates, one of our nation’s wealthiest individuals, in his Harvard commencement speech, talked about the problem facing society of inequality as being the most daunting challenge, and talked about what must be done to combat it, saying, “Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries, but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.” And there’s the Giving Pledge, in which more than 100 of our nation’s wealthiest individuals are pledging half of their fortunes to charity. And there’s the emergence of dozens of grassroots movements, like We are the One Percent, the Resource Generation, or Wealth for Common Good, in which the most privileged members of the population, members of the one percent and elsewhere, people who are wealthy, are using their own economic resources, adults and youth alike, that’s what’s most striking to me, leveraging their own privilege, their own economic resources, to combat inequality by advocating for social policies, changes in social values, and changes in people’s behavior, that work against their own economic interests but that may ultimately restore the American dream.