Are the rich getting richer? Take our quiz on inequality and incomes.

The income gap between rich and poor has widened in the United States and in many other advanced economies since the 1970s. The trend makes this a hot political topic at a time when middle-class families feel they are struggling to get ahead, and as some wonder whether inequality is harming economic growth. This quiz tests how big (or narrow!) your own "gap" is when it comes to knowing the economics and politics of income disparities from the French Revolution to the Great Recession.

18. Prior to becoming president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks once challenged students in an economics class over their view that it’s unfair for the rich to have so much more than the poor. He proposed that a quarter of the points earned by the top half of the class be passed on to the students in the lower half to improve grade equality. What was his students’ response?

Issei Kato/Reuters
A money changer shows some one-hundred U.S. dollar bills at an exchange booth in Tokyo November 8, 2010.

The students agreed unanimously with his idea.

Most students agreed with his idea.

Most students said this would be unfair.

All the students said this would be unfair.

Javascript is disabled. Quiz scoring requires Javascript.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.