I actually did a research on this a few days ago for my class, I am an undergraduate in sociology at UC Irvine.
one of the main factors of the rich getting richer are racial orientation and stereotypes, along with gender.
The Gini coefficient method is a way used to calculate the gap between the richest and the poorest working class. This information is calculated from the census yearly I believe.
Anyways onto the mainpoint of the topic - i'll list a few to what I think causes it.
Certainly and obviously there are stereotypes on what gender should be doing what job - such as secretaries for females, CEO and other dominant roles for males, etc.
But another great factor are the racial stereotypes. You have what jobs are commonly unsaid but known for minorities like African-Americans, Hispanics. Then you have high occupations like presidential position usually seeing that it is occupied by whites. we have stuff like Asian american parents stressing their kids to take certain majors at school like computer programming, EE, biology, medical, ETC. Obviously these jobs do not require any sort of racial bias, it's about what you're capable of doing, so minorities like these generally know it's a safer occupation to pursue.
then we have stuff like people being born rich and poor. The rich can continue to do whatever they need, but take a look at the poor people, who aren't given proper chance to be able to have a potential future. stuff like kids being dragged into gangs because of their need for money, or where we have impacting things like African Americans being stereotyped as 'bad examples and failures of the American Dream' stuff, then some start believing it was this way and blind their futures.
If you look at a country like Japan, where high economic prosperity is evident - and that it is continuing strong, you would want to compare it to the US and try to figure out to why such a small island overwhelms a big state. And for that one major factor, is the race there. There are relatively little minorities in comparison to the US - where 6% are asian, 12% hispanic, 13% african american, 1% american indian, and 72% white. These numbers are from t he 2000 census.
thus it's safe to say that with less racial segregation in Japan - the middle class accounts for about 90% of the population, is the reason to why there is relatively little income inequality at work.
it is a very long issue and has many other subcategories that are related to it.
how can we fix this though, for one thing I think is intermarriage. When you see others marry a racial group completely different to their own, you subconciously would probably see it as an indicator to how far apart these racial groups could be. Then we have people in the future who are more likely to intermarry due to influences like at the present time. And when we see that each race is perfectly capable of doing whatever manner given proper fashion, less stereotypes starts building out on race, and then jobs start considering everyone as equal. that will be one step towards getting income being distributed evenly.
anyways i've rambled too much I think.
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