Category: Class

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 to the… Continue reading The social wage

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… Continue reading Transit fares and distribution

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 and low… Continue reading US poverty rates broken down finer than ever before

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 out of… Continue reading That time when we fought poverty and won

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 — and is… Continue reading It’s the distribution, stupid