Morris Chang said, ”I arrived in America at the age 18, and at the time, I was not very affluent. However, my father and I had the American dream. By the time I was 40, I had accumulated enough wealth to live at the same standard as the top 10% of the American population.” He asked Bernanke if the new immigrants to America, who have low incomes and live in slums, can still embrace this kind of American dream?

Bernanke replied that the problem of unequal distribution of wealth definitely exists. In fact, in America most people believe that they are part of the middle class and want to continue to climb up into the upper classes. However, he admitted, “for the bottom 20% of low-income people, the probability of entering the top 20% is already very low. It is even lower than in Europe.”

However, Bernanke also believes that in spite of the worsening income distribution in one country, when looking at the global average, the income distribution is more equal than it was in the past.

Morris Change stated that he fears that Taiwan’s income gap will become like America’s situation in 20 years. Bernanke stated that with continual technological improvement, more advanced education is needed. If the quality of the people does not rise, he is afraid that they will fall into competing with low-income countries with low levels of education.

However, Bernanke is not pessimistic about the poverty gap. He explained that today’s medical care is drastically better than it was 20 years ago, and people can now use Internet resources, such as Facebook, free of charge. Hence, people’s lifestyles are better than they were 20 years ago.

“Inequality is not necessarily a bad thing. The most important thing is finding ways to seize opportunities,” he explained. “The American dream is not a question of everybody being rich. It is a question of whether or not middle class people can use their abilities and make use of opportunities to work their way into the upper classes.”

(TR/Phil Sweeney)