Thank you for writing why inequality matters and how everyone is impacted by it. There are also lots of versions of inequality that also have no formal metrics. I very rarely find myself being asked to participate in national surveys but I did answer the phone on an occasion when the caller identified herself as representing the Virginia Health Department. It was post-COVID and thought I be able to include my experience in the survey data. But it hit me as I was asked questions that there was no way for me to explain where I felt left out of the COVID response. Just because my child did not receive free and reduced lunch did not mean, our family had access to all the social safety nets that existed. I struggled with affordable home internet access (old cooper) for my kids to do virtual school and yet my neighbor's kids had school meals delivered to their home with a school bus. Families that received free and reduced lunch also received a Wi-Fi hotspot. Non-African American population in our health district were required to wait for appointment slots for vaccinations because there was a concerted campaign to ensure that African American families in our community were given first access. However, since there was so much historic mistrust in this population with the medical establishment, and rightly so, everyone else just needed to wait until there was really just enough vaccinations for everyone who wanted one. Vaccine hesitancy had an impact on others’ health care access which is not widely recognized.
You’re right that so many communities are rarely counted in the data. I will say though that now that I’ve spent a decade using local data from dozens of government agencies, even without survey data they tend to do a pretty decent job at getting insights on a lot of Americans. This can happen through employers, hospitals, banks, voting records, and much more. Healthcare data and internet data though are particularly challenged, as you rightly pointed out
As someone who became a parent a bit later than most, I have had more time than most new parents to think about the kind of world I would want to bring a child into.
Fortunately, during the years in which I delayed, wondering if I would ever be comfortable enough with the idea to go for it, I came across an economic ideology which gave me hope that we can actually fix the wealth gap. The more I read about it, the more I realized that economists across the political spectrum actually support such policies. Even partial implementations are so potent that places like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania have been able to renew their city, trigger a construction boom, attract investors, and ride out the dips in economic cycles.
It baffles me that with people so concerned about lack of housing, high inflation, and many other economic issues, few people invest the time toward better understanding how the economy works -- and end up voting for high tariffs instead. I mostly see this as a failure to make economists accountable for being able to accurately predict outcomes. This causes folks to lose faith in their credibility, and the study of economics in general.
All this is to say, we know how to fix our problems. These solutions have been around for a long time. We simply lack the will to implement them. And changing the lack of will, to me, is doable.
For anyone who wants to join me in mitigating the ever-increasing wealth gap, I welcome all the help we can get.
Too many were complacent during this last election cycle thinking someone else will do the work.
As a parent of a toddler, I know that time is fleeting. My kid will be grown before long and trying to navigate the economic system we've handed down. I can't afford to wait for someone else to take up the cause. Can you?
A powerful message! And yes we must all band together to create meaningful change. We are definitely getting better and understanding the problems and the solutions are emerging more and more.
This is a difficult topic for me to comment on without eliciting a strong emotional response. I see not only my own life in the statistics you mention but the lives of my childhood peers who are increasingly being left behind in the places I grew up in, in California no less.
I escaped poverty, got out by the skin of my teeth by being clever, having grit, swallowing my pride, and more often than not by simple dumb luck. It took the better part of a decade, to grind my way from the verge of homelessness at 21 to graduating at 29 as a Computer Engineer with several internships, across Robotics startups, NASA, JPL and FAANG, under my belt. That’s not to mention the roles I turned down at places like Blue Origin and Oak Ridge National Labs. It took complete single mindedness to do that, which indelibly left me critical of our education system, housing policies and language about the poor.
That was four years ago, I’ve been middle class for that long. Only in the last 2 years have I begun to reconcile with this newfound stability in my life by finding peace in living well. Giving back to my community: the people who helped me get out, the friends and family back home I left behind. Poverty stays with you long after you’ve escaped it, it’s traumatic.
Anyhow, I really appreciate your post. Long ago I was once a student of Political Economy, deeply immersed in the scholarship on poverty and inequality. The work of Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz. It warms my heart that people like you continue to bear that torch. Thank you!
Inequality matters bc it gives righteous indignation to those who are treated unfairly, which comes with the right to resist using any means available. Civilization requires a minimum level of reciprocity, incl. at least equality of opportunity.
Fascinating! If we want to build wealth we must stop facilities for elders taking all their money. The good ones charge $7-$15,000/month depending on the state and whether memory care is required.
The effects of inequality were a major part of my grad studies in public health. One interesting element that you leave out is that within societies with larger inequality, even the health of people at the top end of the income ladder is worse than those who earn far less money and have far fewer resources, but live in countries with lower inequality.the gap poles at the top down just as much as it pulls it from the bottom.
Very true! The US is a great example of this. Our life expectancy is far worse than other comparable countries with less and inequality. , and inequality
You didn't post the Gini Index. In fact, inequality hasn't changed much since the early 90s, but Americans are much better off materially. There has been considerable up and down mobility. Ordinary people continue to be able to afford things like expensive cell phones that were not available then. The American "poor" are about even with the European middle class. That some people have fabulous wealth has no impact at all on the chance of a lower-income person rising. However, government policies do a lot of harm. Almost everyone pays far too much for a house (or apartment) because of zoning laws, and that's a big chunk of personal income. State licensing sustains the medical and dental cartels that price many Americans out of good care. Such things are far more pressing than inequality. Envy is a lousy social policy.
Upward mobility is actually at an all time low. You are right the Gini index hasn't changed much, but I also don't think Gini is a great measure of inequality. I agree that government could change a lot of policies to address inequality and the ones you mentioned are spot on (zoning, licensing, medical expenses). But government can also do a lot of good for improving inequality (EITC, CTC, SNAP, etc) https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1854489701912092809
What is the research on upward mobility look likr? Does it factor in how many Americans are immigrants, and how does it measure a person, for example, who was born in Central America, grew up in Los Angeles and is now a young lower-wage worker? There's certainly an argument that that person is upwardly mobile.
I also always wonder if these mobility studies factor in family size since it's a strong determinant of parental resources and investment and there's probably a negative correlation between education and family size and wealthy areas of the country and family size. I would guess that equalizing mobility between larger and smaller families (to say nothing of single moms) is a tough task for government.
1. Define "rich." As of 2021, $169,000 in adjusted gross income put a person in the top 10%.
2. Why are you concerned about the deficit, which does scant harm, but not the $36 trillion dollar national debt, which does serious harm? The federal budget portion for just interest on the debt is greater than the military budget.
3. If you confiscated the wealth of the top 1 percent it would pay off the debt, and then you would have a country that would collapse. Whole industries would die because a huge chunk of what makes people "rich" is invested. There is very little cash sitting around, and it would come nowhere close to paying the debt.
4. The bottom 50 percent of earners pay less than 3% of federal taxes, yet they are wealthier (when all sources of income are included) than the average European. Why are Europeans at that level expected to pay taxes while Americans are not? What is fair about dividing a country into payers and non-payers? Why are the people who create to be punished and the people who consume to be rewarded?
One more thing I’d like to say. Sound government programs are a necessary, but not a sufficient means to alleviate poverty. There is no substitute for decent parents, of each sex, having decent means. One man and one woman committed to each other and to their children is the single greatest program of escaping poverty known. But at least one of them has to have a decent, well-paying job. That means we cannot permit the Fortune 1,000 to use the fad of going global to eliminate hundreds of thousands of good-paying industrial jobs, without doing the hard work and reform of figuring out exactly how to employ those left behind. Globalization royally screwed the bottom sixty percent of our population, with the benefits captured by the upper crust. Don’t wonder why our politics are in total disarray. Snap the Social Contract in two, and that’s what you get. Let’s bury the idea that corporations exist to make those already wealthy even more wealthy. Corporations do not exist primarily for the benefit of their stockholders. Yes, they must be compensated for the risk of investing their capital— the greater the risk, the greater the reward—but the Fortune 1000 exists to be society’s milk cows. Their purpose is to create wealth by earning a rate of return greater than their cost of capital, in order to create prosperity for their employees, their local communities, and the broader society in which they exist as a going concern.
Let’s get serious. Let’s return to government of, by, and for the people.
>Isn’t it just as likely that an Einstein is born in Cincinnati as San Francisco?
The birthplaces of geniuses are probably quite random since geniuses are elusive. But the average smart person is more likely to be born to smart parents, who generally live in better-off cities. Thus I find it hard to believe that talent is equally distributed.
I guess it depends on your view of nurture vs nature. There isn’t a “smart” gene. But wealthier parents spend more time reading to their kids, taking them to after school programs, and offering better language and math learning environments. If every parent had the funds and capacity to do that, I think we’d see a more level distribution.
We have known since Jefferson’s time that we can have vast disparities of wealth or democracy, but not both at the same time. Rule of, by, and for the billionaires among us is a mortal threat to democracy of, by, and for the people. The ultra wealthy cannot help but skew our entire polity towards themselves, the devil take the hindmost. Look around. You’ll see it.
Barack Obama is an integral part of the problem. Reexamine his voting record prior to becoming president and ask yourself, “Is this guy actually a democrat, or a republican in democratic clothing?” An Elizabeth Warren he is not. Subsequent to the great meltdown of 2008, who received the most assistance? Wall Street, the origin of the crisis, received assistance amounting to dollar on the dollar, not pennies on the dollar. Did any of the collateralized debt fraudsters see the insides of a jail? The millions of people who lost jobs, homes, and savings got pittance for assistance. Gee whiz, blue collar America votes for Trump, in revenge for democrat’s ignoring everything FDR taught them.
Love this piece.
So glad to hear it
Thank you for writing why inequality matters and how everyone is impacted by it. There are also lots of versions of inequality that also have no formal metrics. I very rarely find myself being asked to participate in national surveys but I did answer the phone on an occasion when the caller identified herself as representing the Virginia Health Department. It was post-COVID and thought I be able to include my experience in the survey data. But it hit me as I was asked questions that there was no way for me to explain where I felt left out of the COVID response. Just because my child did not receive free and reduced lunch did not mean, our family had access to all the social safety nets that existed. I struggled with affordable home internet access (old cooper) for my kids to do virtual school and yet my neighbor's kids had school meals delivered to their home with a school bus. Families that received free and reduced lunch also received a Wi-Fi hotspot. Non-African American population in our health district were required to wait for appointment slots for vaccinations because there was a concerted campaign to ensure that African American families in our community were given first access. However, since there was so much historic mistrust in this population with the medical establishment, and rightly so, everyone else just needed to wait until there was really just enough vaccinations for everyone who wanted one. Vaccine hesitancy had an impact on others’ health care access which is not widely recognized.
You’re right that so many communities are rarely counted in the data. I will say though that now that I’ve spent a decade using local data from dozens of government agencies, even without survey data they tend to do a pretty decent job at getting insights on a lot of Americans. This can happen through employers, hospitals, banks, voting records, and much more. Healthcare data and internet data though are particularly challenged, as you rightly pointed out
As someone who became a parent a bit later than most, I have had more time than most new parents to think about the kind of world I would want to bring a child into.
Fortunately, during the years in which I delayed, wondering if I would ever be comfortable enough with the idea to go for it, I came across an economic ideology which gave me hope that we can actually fix the wealth gap. The more I read about it, the more I realized that economists across the political spectrum actually support such policies. Even partial implementations are so potent that places like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania have been able to renew their city, trigger a construction boom, attract investors, and ride out the dips in economic cycles.
It baffles me that with people so concerned about lack of housing, high inflation, and many other economic issues, few people invest the time toward better understanding how the economy works -- and end up voting for high tariffs instead. I mostly see this as a failure to make economists accountable for being able to accurately predict outcomes. This causes folks to lose faith in their credibility, and the study of economics in general.
All this is to say, we know how to fix our problems. These solutions have been around for a long time. We simply lack the will to implement them. And changing the lack of will, to me, is doable.
For anyone who wants to join me in mitigating the ever-increasing wealth gap, I welcome all the help we can get.
Too many were complacent during this last election cycle thinking someone else will do the work.
As a parent of a toddler, I know that time is fleeting. My kid will be grown before long and trying to navigate the economic system we've handed down. I can't afford to wait for someone else to take up the cause. Can you?
A powerful message! And yes we must all band together to create meaningful change. We are definitely getting better and understanding the problems and the solutions are emerging more and more.
The crucial fact is that inequality of outcomes in one generation produces inequality of opportunity in the next. The US is a prime example of this.
Definitely. And this is why we need to address these issues sooner rather than later. Because otherwise they balloon in pretty bad ways
This is a difficult topic for me to comment on without eliciting a strong emotional response. I see not only my own life in the statistics you mention but the lives of my childhood peers who are increasingly being left behind in the places I grew up in, in California no less.
I escaped poverty, got out by the skin of my teeth by being clever, having grit, swallowing my pride, and more often than not by simple dumb luck. It took the better part of a decade, to grind my way from the verge of homelessness at 21 to graduating at 29 as a Computer Engineer with several internships, across Robotics startups, NASA, JPL and FAANG, under my belt. That’s not to mention the roles I turned down at places like Blue Origin and Oak Ridge National Labs. It took complete single mindedness to do that, which indelibly left me critical of our education system, housing policies and language about the poor.
That was four years ago, I’ve been middle class for that long. Only in the last 2 years have I begun to reconcile with this newfound stability in my life by finding peace in living well. Giving back to my community: the people who helped me get out, the friends and family back home I left behind. Poverty stays with you long after you’ve escaped it, it’s traumatic.
Anyhow, I really appreciate your post. Long ago I was once a student of Political Economy, deeply immersed in the scholarship on poverty and inequality. The work of Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz. It warms my heart that people like you continue to bear that torch. Thank you!
Thank you for sharing your story Luis and for the kind words
Inequality matters bc it gives righteous indignation to those who are treated unfairly, which comes with the right to resist using any means available. Civilization requires a minimum level of reciprocity, incl. at least equality of opportunity.
An interesting read, somewhat related to this post: https://personal.lse.ac.uk/robert49/teaching/mm/articles/Singer_1972Famine.pdf
Peter Singer is a fascinating philosopher thanks for sharing
Fascinating! If we want to build wealth we must stop facilities for elders taking all their money. The good ones charge $7-$15,000/month depending on the state and whether memory care is required.
Wow did not know about the Great Gatsby Curve. Fascinating!
The effects of inequality were a major part of my grad studies in public health. One interesting element that you leave out is that within societies with larger inequality, even the health of people at the top end of the income ladder is worse than those who earn far less money and have far fewer resources, but live in countries with lower inequality.the gap poles at the top down just as much as it pulls it from the bottom.
Very true! The US is a great example of this. Our life expectancy is far worse than other comparable countries with less and inequality. , and inequality
You didn't post the Gini Index. In fact, inequality hasn't changed much since the early 90s, but Americans are much better off materially. There has been considerable up and down mobility. Ordinary people continue to be able to afford things like expensive cell phones that were not available then. The American "poor" are about even with the European middle class. That some people have fabulous wealth has no impact at all on the chance of a lower-income person rising. However, government policies do a lot of harm. Almost everyone pays far too much for a house (or apartment) because of zoning laws, and that's a big chunk of personal income. State licensing sustains the medical and dental cartels that price many Americans out of good care. Such things are far more pressing than inequality. Envy is a lousy social policy.
Upward mobility is actually at an all time low. You are right the Gini index hasn't changed much, but I also don't think Gini is a great measure of inequality. I agree that government could change a lot of policies to address inequality and the ones you mentioned are spot on (zoning, licensing, medical expenses). But government can also do a lot of good for improving inequality (EITC, CTC, SNAP, etc) https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1854489701912092809
What is the research on upward mobility look likr? Does it factor in how many Americans are immigrants, and how does it measure a person, for example, who was born in Central America, grew up in Los Angeles and is now a young lower-wage worker? There's certainly an argument that that person is upwardly mobile.
I also always wonder if these mobility studies factor in family size since it's a strong determinant of parental resources and investment and there's probably a negative correlation between education and family size and wealthy areas of the country and family size. I would guess that equalizing mobility between larger and smaller families (to say nothing of single moms) is a tough task for government.
What I want from “the rich” — not just from them — is more of their (consumed) resources to reduce the deficit.
1. Define "rich." As of 2021, $169,000 in adjusted gross income put a person in the top 10%.
2. Why are you concerned about the deficit, which does scant harm, but not the $36 trillion dollar national debt, which does serious harm? The federal budget portion for just interest on the debt is greater than the military budget.
3. If you confiscated the wealth of the top 1 percent it would pay off the debt, and then you would have a country that would collapse. Whole industries would die because a huge chunk of what makes people "rich" is invested. There is very little cash sitting around, and it would come nowhere close to paying the debt.
4. The bottom 50 percent of earners pay less than 3% of federal taxes, yet they are wealthier (when all sources of income are included) than the average European. Why are Europeans at that level expected to pay taxes while Americans are not? What is fair about dividing a country into payers and non-payers? Why are the people who create to be punished and the people who consume to be rewarded?
One more thing I’d like to say. Sound government programs are a necessary, but not a sufficient means to alleviate poverty. There is no substitute for decent parents, of each sex, having decent means. One man and one woman committed to each other and to their children is the single greatest program of escaping poverty known. But at least one of them has to have a decent, well-paying job. That means we cannot permit the Fortune 1,000 to use the fad of going global to eliminate hundreds of thousands of good-paying industrial jobs, without doing the hard work and reform of figuring out exactly how to employ those left behind. Globalization royally screwed the bottom sixty percent of our population, with the benefits captured by the upper crust. Don’t wonder why our politics are in total disarray. Snap the Social Contract in two, and that’s what you get. Let’s bury the idea that corporations exist to make those already wealthy even more wealthy. Corporations do not exist primarily for the benefit of their stockholders. Yes, they must be compensated for the risk of investing their capital— the greater the risk, the greater the reward—but the Fortune 1000 exists to be society’s milk cows. Their purpose is to create wealth by earning a rate of return greater than their cost of capital, in order to create prosperity for their employees, their local communities, and the broader society in which they exist as a going concern.
Let’s get serious. Let’s return to government of, by, and for the people.
>Isn’t it just as likely that an Einstein is born in Cincinnati as San Francisco?
The birthplaces of geniuses are probably quite random since geniuses are elusive. But the average smart person is more likely to be born to smart parents, who generally live in better-off cities. Thus I find it hard to believe that talent is equally distributed.
I guess it depends on your view of nurture vs nature. There isn’t a “smart” gene. But wealthier parents spend more time reading to their kids, taking them to after school programs, and offering better language and math learning environments. If every parent had the funds and capacity to do that, I think we’d see a more level distribution.
We have known since Jefferson’s time that we can have vast disparities of wealth or democracy, but not both at the same time. Rule of, by, and for the billionaires among us is a mortal threat to democracy of, by, and for the people. The ultra wealthy cannot help but skew our entire polity towards themselves, the devil take the hindmost. Look around. You’ll see it.
Barack Obama is an integral part of the problem. Reexamine his voting record prior to becoming president and ask yourself, “Is this guy actually a democrat, or a republican in democratic clothing?” An Elizabeth Warren he is not. Subsequent to the great meltdown of 2008, who received the most assistance? Wall Street, the origin of the crisis, received assistance amounting to dollar on the dollar, not pennies on the dollar. Did any of the collateralized debt fraudsters see the insides of a jail? The millions of people who lost jobs, homes, and savings got pittance for assistance. Gee whiz, blue collar America votes for Trump, in revenge for democrat’s ignoring everything FDR taught them.