Category: Class

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 of charts, the… Continue reading The rise of income inequality since 1917

Gallup is out with new data on the correlation of poverty to other problems. It turns out that poverty is actually really bad. Stunning I know. There is lots of great data in the Gallup release, including two questions on healthy food affordability and consumption, a topic that seems to be really popular these days… Continue reading Turns out that poverty is still really bad

Earlier I summarized what I think are the four most often mentioned ideas about why poor kids do worse in school. It is not just school of course: poor kids do worse in any number of ways throughout their life. Among the theories, I think the “effects of poverty” theory has the most plausibility and… Continue reading More support for risk-stress model of why poor kids do worse

Anyone with even a passing interest in discussions of poverty has heard of the poverty cycle. The poverty cycle explains why poor kids wind up poor as adults by demonstrating that the conditions that correspond with growing up poor set the stage for future poverty. In what seems to be its most popular form, the… Continue reading Think about the poverty cycle really hard

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of causation is actually extraordinarily tricky. Once we step out of hard physical sciences (and perhaps even then), attributing a cause to an effect becomes a very difficult matter. Here I go over some of the problems with showing causation and look specifically at the “cause” of poverty. The… Continue reading Why talking about the “cause” of poverty is incoherent