Seven

Is money happiness? I think that in a way, the Twain story twists this assumption. I think Twain was trying to say that status—not actual money—is what counts. Henry leveraged his status as the millionaire to make investments and to survive for 30 days, without ever having cashed the note. I question whether or not that bet would have worked in 2014 because it requires a deeply ranked society (which England in the 1800s, easily satisfied). But that is the question! Isn't America in 2014, a society divided by status? Seeing the huge income inequality (highlighted as a "suspension bridge" graph in Inequality for All) seems to prove that America is divided by status. But I think rather than status, our country is unlike England (as a whole) in that we never had an aristocracy to divide us by status. There is no royalty here, and in many circles, it doesn't matter if you used to live in a trailer park and then invested in Microsoft and became a millionaire! I think that people here are more apt to accept a rags to riches story. However, this notion is complicated when you think of stories like The Great Gatsby where there was an acute distinction between "new money" and "old money" which divided even the rich from the rich based on how they had acquired their wealth.  

In the Inequality for All trailer, we see that there are a lot of people who think money is everything. But again, this notion is complicated when we read counterarguments like in "Why U.S. Taxpayers Pay $7 Billion a Year To Help Fast Food Workers" from the so called "center right" leaning economist (which upon seeing the label made me ponder why Jacobs political affiliation was not mentioned…) who argued that raising the wages for fast food workers to $15/hour would end up harming them because owners would hire less frequently. To me, this asserts that again, the actual money received, is not as important as the status that accompanies it. The two illustrations on the scan reveal from one source that more money does mean more happiness. While I am not discrediting USA Today or Pew Research, I do question why they did not go above $100,000 in their illustration. I think that going one bracket higher would have revealed a decrease in happiness. If it didn't I would still question the validity of it because truthfully, how does one define "happiness"? I would like to see exactly how the survey was conducted before I jumped to any conclusions about money equating happiness.

In the two articles about fast food workers in the Seattle Times, I thought that they both had valid points. While the woman who complained about "poor" people whining, was harsh, I think the argument is so much bigger than what she brings up. The real question is whether or not our economy could sustain a shift in the middle class. I'd be curious to see the movie Inequality for All to see what he would say about that. This brought to mind the Murphy movie because really, this is an example of the less talked about problem: rich people using poor people as puppets! We saw this in the Twain story and I think that it is interesting that we are so wrapped up in the "charity" of rich people when really, they are leveraging their position to play games with other people's futures.