"There has never been a larger gap between earnings in this country," Buffett said. "There has never been a time in my lifetime when the government is going to cut an incredible amount of programs that support poor people and feed them."
Such trends have left their mark on public sentiment. Though a majority of Americans reject the idea that the country is divided between "haves" and "have-nots," those seeing such a divide rose to 45 percent from 35 percent in 2009, according to a Pew Research Center poll released Sept. 29. The sharpest increase occurred among self-described political independents.
Economists such as the late Arthur Okun, a chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in the 1960s, traditionally believed that societies could emphasize equality or growth, not both. Now, in an age where the quality of human capital plays a larger role in determining economic outcomes, many economists -- including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke -- say the two are linked.
Growing Gap
"The large and growing gap between the haves and have-nots will tend to undermine growth, both directly and indirectly -- including by reducing the marginal propensity to consume and by amplifying the political polarization that has already contributed to poor economic policymaking," says Mohamed El- Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California.
Branko Milanovic, a World Bank economist, added in a September article: "Widespread education has become the secret to growth. And broadly accessible education is difficult to achieve unless a society has a relatively even income distribution."
Since 1968, incomes in the U.S. have become steadily less equally distributed, according to the standard statistical measure of inequality known as the Gini coefficient. The U.S. Gini score rose from .39 in 1968 to .47 in 2010, meaning that incomes were becoming increasingly unequal.
Distributional Thermometer
Developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912, the scores represent a kind of distributional thermometer, ranging from 0 (each person enjoying equal shares of income) to 1 (one person has all income).
In the 30-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only Turkey and Mexico have more unequal societies than the United States. In the U.S., the rich-poor gap widened by 20 percent since the mid-1980s, more than in most developed countries. "Nowhere has this trend been so stark as in the United States," the OECD concluded in a 2008 study.