New post at policy shop. Excerpt:

Of course the fixation on stocks is rather predictable. All sorts of people hold stock, but the wealthy especially. According to the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances, while 17.9 percent of all families have stock holdings, 52.4 percent of those in the wealthiest 10 percent of families [...]

New post at policy shop. Excerpt:

There are two conceivable paths to having a low post-T&T poverty rate, this again being the rate of most significance to people’s lived lives. A country can put a lot of effort into bringing up the market incomes of low-income people. Or it can compensate for those [...]

A while ago, I had a post with an animation showing how much countries reduce their poverty rates with taxes and transfers. I have recreated that animation with a new stock of data coming from the OECD for 2010. It features 26 countries.

Each dot represents a country (hover over to see [...]

New post at Policy Shop, which is now at Demos.org. Excerpt:

Since the recession, total debt levels among the young have fallen. According to Pew, the median debt of below-35 households fell between 2007 and 2011 from $21.9k to $15.5k, a 29% decline. This debt decline holds for those with and [...]

New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:

But, as Hacker correctly points out, my view is almost certainly an outlying one. For cultural or other reasons, Americans tend to be more supportive of equality-producing measures that get baked into paychecks than they are of equality-producing measures that go through more overt government channels. As [...]

New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:

This is not because all of the jobs being created in the wake of the recession are those that require college-degreed workers. In fact, around 44 percent of the job growth last month came in the retail and hospitality/leisure sectors, sectors traditionally open to those without a [...]

I have a piece in The Atlantic today, the first of hopefully many to come. An excerpt:

All of this is to say that there are non-material ways in which high levels of inequality diminish quality of life, for the poor especially, but even for middle and upper-income individuals. Distrust and mental illness [...]

New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:

These two facts — decoupling and income growth divergence — are the only facts you need to make the case that our distributive institutions are failing. Growth is supposed to benefit everyone at relatively equal rates. That is the official story of why productivity growth is the [...]

I wrote a post yesterday about poverty and race. The basic gist was that there are a lot of poor Whites, which is something quite a few people do not realize. The percentage of White people in poverty is lower than Blacks and Hispanics, but because there are just so many Whites, there [...]

You would be surprised how many people do not realize that there are a lot of poor whites in this country. This is especially true among the wealthier white social justice types. For a long time, I assumed that these activists did not care that much about class issues, which is perhaps troubling in some [...]