Band 7+: International entertainers, including sports personalities, often get paid millions of dollars in one year. In your view, with widespread poverty in the world, are these huge earnings justified? You should give reasons for your answer using your own ideas and experience.

Inequality of Income

Income inequality is a huge problem most people have been discussing since ancient times. Since the Industrial Revolution, the gap between the poor and rich is getting bigger and bigger. This gap reached its peak in the twenty-first century.

One particular area where income inequality can be particularly seen is the entertainment industry. For example, the biggest actors of our time can easily make more than 10 million dollars by starring in a single Hollywood movie. On the other hand, the background crew -cameramen, lighting crew, make-up artists, decoration experts, etc.- that we don’t see on the big screen, are struggling to find jobs and most of the time work on a minimum wage. The same goes for other areas of the entertainment industry, as long as you are not the producer or the lead singer, the music industry can be quite cruel against you. We see arenas, or stadiums filled with thousands of people who are there to watch and listen to a superstar. On the other side of town, whole neighborhoods are struggling to make a living for themselves. This reality comes with a background to think about.

There are thousands of homeless people who are willing to work but can not find jobs. Child deaths are, to this day, quite common in some African countries. People are forced to work for 2 dollars per hour in Asia, to keep up with the demands of billion-dollar-worth technology companies. We, as consumers, mostly choose to ignore this harsh reality of today’s world just to keep living the life we were born into. We think we live in times where inequality of any kind is mostly out of question. However, there are more than a billion people all around the globe who work for literally nothing. The amount of money they made in their lifetimes is nothing compared to what a sportsperson or a movie star can make in just a year.

In conclusion, the huge amounts of money one can make by singing a couple of songs or following a ball for ninety minutes is nowhere near justifiable while more than a billion people are working for less than the minimum wage in the US.