income inequality

Consequences of Economic Inequality for Presidential Elections in U.S.

Rhonda Howard — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 11:58:20 -0400

In a new report on income inequality, authors James Galbraith and Jaehee Choi examine whether there is an association between income inequality and American presidential politics. An excerpt from the introduction follows:

For the first three decades following the end of the Second World War, economic inequality barely figured as a topic of economic research, and some major preoccupations, notably in growth theory, presupposed stability in functional shares. But this changed as evidence of rising inequality began to emerge for the United States in the late 1970s, and by the early 1990s a robust debate over the sources of rising inequality was underway, which spread to all the advanced countries and beyond, especially as the publication of the Deininger-Squire/World Bank (1996) compilation of past surveys opened a path toward empirical investigation at global scale.

Given that US presidential elections are decided on a state-by-state basis through a winner-take-all allocation of votes in the Electoral College, we ask whether and to what degree levels or changes of economic inequality at the level of individual states affect the partisan alignment of those states and therefore the outcome of US presidential elections.

Read/download the full report here.

Mapping Urban Income Dispersion

Mark Schill — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:30:23 -0400

Here's some cool maps from radicalcartography.net looking at income dispersion in the country's 25 largest metropolitan areas by population. From the page:

These maps show the distribution of income (per capita) around the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the US (all those with population greater than 2,000,000). The goal was to test the "donut" hypothesis — the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the "revitalized" downtown, and the poor stuck in between.

This does seem to have some validity in older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but in newer cities it is not the case. Instead of donuts, one finds "wedges" of wealth occupying a continuous pie-slice from the center to the periphery.

Just from visual inspection, it also seems that poverty donuts all tend to have about a five-mile radius, regardless of the size of the city. Perhaps this is the practical limit for commuting without a car?

All maps are at the same scale, and all use the same color values for income.

Income Chasm Growing in Massachusetts

Andy Sywak — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:26:58 -0400

Mirroring a national trend, the income gap is increasing in the Bay State. From the Boston Globe article:

"The gap between rich and poor has widened substantially in Massachusetts over the past two decades, according to a new study by the University of Massachusetts. Only those earning the highest incomes benefited from gains in technology, productivity, and globalization, while middle-class earnings stagnated and incomes for poor families plunged 15 percent."