California Has Extreme Income Inequality. Why Do We Treat It As Normal?

California is one of the most unequal states in the country with extreme disparities between people living in poverty and those at the top of the income spectrum. Given the visibility of the problem, with homeless encampments and multimillion dollar houses populating our landscape while the middle class shrinks, UC Berkeley professors Cristina Mora and Tianna Paschel set out to find out why Californians are “aware of inequality but not incensed about it.” They interviewed 136 Californians in the state’s “precarious middle class” — people who were getting by, but barely – and surveyed thousands more for their book, “Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide.” We’ll talk with Mora and Paschel about why income inequality is on the rise in California, and the perils of accepting it.