An Inequality Quiz: The Answers

The answers to all these quiz questions, as noted below, appear in Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives (The Apex Press), by Too Much editor Sam Pizzigati.

The full text of Greed and Good appears online. For more on any of the issues these quiz questions raise, check the page references below.

1. True. G.E. CEO Jack Welch walked off with $144.5 million in 2000. His counterpart at G.E. in 1975 took home $500,000. See the Introduction to Greed and Good, p. xxiv.

2. False. Middle-income people, studies show, donate a higher share of their resources to charity than their wealthier counterparts. See the “Charity and Compassion” chapter in Greed and Good, pp. 134-136.

3. True. A finding that has emerged from the International Luxembourg Income Study. See note 132 in Greed and Good, p. 557.

4. False. The arts in America have had their most expansive years during eras when wealth was more evenly distributed, not accumulating in high-income pockets. See “Culture and Art” in Greed and Good, pp. 144-149.

5. True. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the only nonreligious book that outsold Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. See the Intro to Greed and Good, p. xvi.

6. True. A phenomenon first tracked by the University of Chicago’s Sam Peltzman. See “A Fraying Social Fabric” in Greed and Good, p. 348.

7. True. Research by Notre Dame’s Matt Bloom has documented this dynamic in professional baseball. See “Sports Without Winners” in Greed and Good, pp. 308-309.

8. False. The size of the gap between the rich and everyone else does a better job of predicting state-by-state mortality rates than the number of poor people. See “Health Without Wealth” in Greed and Good, pp. 314-315.

9. True. See “The Ineffective Enterprise” in Greed and Good, pp. 162-163.

10. True. In 1942, FDR proposed a 100 percent tax on all income over $25,000, about $300,000 in today’s dollars. See “Historic Struggles” in Greed and Good, pp. 440-441.