New post over at Policy Shop. An excerpt:

If we are going to have a discussion about the burdens we put on our young people in America, this is what we need to be talking about. Things like the Ruetschlin-Draut report that focus on the most vulnerable, burdened, and miserable youths should be [...]

Ned Resnikoff has a piece today about high wage retailers, this presumably on the heels of the widely-circulated National Journal piece about the same thing. Both pieces point out that there are high-wage retail firms that are profitable and seem to do pretty well. I was curious as to how much [...]

A Brookings Institute paper about income inequality has been making the rounds, and for good reason. In the paper, the authors draw upon tax data to determine how persistent income inequality is year to year. That is, do folks move up and down the income ladder year to year or do [...]

Food deserts are areas that have no nearby access to healthy foods. For a period, there seemed to be a furor about food deserts, but that has died down recently. A variety of studies came out challenging the idea that bringing healthy food options into food deserts would have any impact on the consumption of [...]

As I’ve mentioned before, I think the best way to tackle inequality and poverty is directly through cash programs. I am not opposed to programs that try to manipulate market wages in some way, unions and minimum wages for instance. But strategies focused on market wages are very messy and almost certainly inadequate [...]

There are good arguments for directly subsidizing public transit. Here I analyze whether directly subsidizing public transit is a good thing to do for distributive reasons.

The best way to go about this is with an example. Suppose we have a public transit system that is entirely financed by fares. Someone proposes that we drop [...]

The Census has a neat report out today using American Community Survey data to detail poverty rates by race, metropolitan area, and so on. The most interesting part of the report is the breakdown of poverty rates within given races. Asians, for instance, are often treated as a monolith population with high incomes [...]

The standard conservative response to poverty is to shrug. The standard liberal response to poverty is to talk about education, education, and then after that some more about education. The range from shrugging to rambling about education is apparently the Overton window for talking about poverty. Anything outside that range is totally shut [...]

Regular readers know by now that I am a big proponent of the idea that poor people are poor because they do not have enough money. This radical theory causes me to support such ideas as distributing enough money to poor people so that they are no longer poor. It seems simple — [...]

I needed to prepare this graph for another project I am working on, and so I figured I would share it here too.

The numbers for this graph come from the famed Piketty-Saez market income data set. I’ve simply indexed income to 100 at 1917. For those not familiar with these kinds [...]