Why is the wealth gap issue so serious?

The wealth gap is so serious that every country needs to pay a lot of attention to. Most countries have been putting lots of effort in reducing their domestic wealth gap and some populist parties gain power through using the wide wealth gap to attack the elites and gain popularity. This is how the wealth gap could affect the political environment and increase the probability of social unrest. It can cause more risk towards the whole society.

Recently the wealth gap becomes even more important that the elite class becomes relatively less significant in terms of political roles. Because of the globalised market, the assets held by the elite class are less restricted by geographical factors, while the other social classes do not have the mobility of their assets, they could care more about the domestic politics than the wealthy class. While they gain more political power, they could attack the wealthy class, as they feel the wealthy class is not loyal to the county and they block their ways to gain more wealth, which is definitely not a good thing to the wealthy gap, though their wealth could be accumulated more easily; moreover, it could even create corruption as these people may accumulate their own wealth after gaining political power.

In addition, wide wealth gap could directly cause economic productivity issues. Although some have argued that wider wealth gap could increase people's incentives to work harder and gain more wealth, wide wealth gap could instead reduce people's incentives to work hard and reduce the economic productivity. Once the economic wealth gap is continuously widening, people will realise that they fall into a wealth trap that they have few opportunities to increase their wealth to reduce their wealth differences with the top wealthy class, then the incentives to work hard will decline sharply and the whole economic productivity will worsen.