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Race and Poverty and the House Ownership Gap: An Interview with Alanna McCargo
We had the pleasure of hosting Alanna McCargo, VP of Housing and Finance Policy at the Urban Institute to help us answer a listener question about wealth inequality, and Xander came across an incredible article with an important question: how does real estate impact the ongoing wealth gap between white Americans and Americans of color? And what drives the ongoing housing gap?
The answer is…. pretty darn complicated. Thanks as always to the Urban Institute for the really enlightening conversation and great questions. Alanna is awesome; this is definitely worth a listen!
What’s Behind the Growing Pay-Productivity Gap? Pt 1, Hypotheses
What’s behind the growing gap between US worker productivity and their pay? In this first half of the analysis, we look at some of the common knee-jerk answers and some of their complications.
How Big is the Gender Pay Gap? As Big as You Want it!
Enough people have asked me a particular sticky question that I decided I’d take a crack at it.
“How big is the gender pay gap?” (That is, the gap between what women and men are paid in the United States.)
After much research, I have found a decisive answer: “It’s as big as you want it to be.”
I Changed My Mind on Basic Income
I used to be a strong advocate of a Basic Income. I’m not anymore. Here’s why I changed my mind.
Defining Poverty… Poorly
So we spoke earlier this week about using either relative or absolute poverty as a predictor of child education. Now we’re thinking a little more about poverty as a whole and I wanted to share some peculiarities.
Measuring Poverty for Education
In researching our upcoming podcast on the US education system, I came across an interesting debate about how to best measure poverty. Since poverty is correlated with poor academic performance (see chart below), the dialogue was focused on whether the US has higher than average poverty rates compared to other countries, which could explain the US’ low test scores.
Data in Policy Debate: Diversity and Racism in the Oscars
For the 2nd year in a row the Oscar nominees for best acting roles have been all white–that’s 40 nominations. The economist points out some other suspicious examples of non-white team members of good films getting snubbed. This has raised some eyebrows and started an ongoing discussion about diversity in the Oscars. Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith are boycotting the Oscars, and Twitter had one of its brief spells of outrage, this time in the form of #oscarssowhite.
We wanted to take the opportunity to take a step back and look at the question with rigor, and understand what the data tells us. The question we think we need to answer is this: “does the Academy have a racial bias in the nomination or award process?”
Would Basic Income Be Affordable in the United States?
In the Something to Consider forums, one of the most popular threads was a discussion about Basic Income: the Considerates discussed whether it might be an effective replacement to the current battery of entitlement programs in the US. In this post, we do some math to figure out what it might cost.
What Are We Doing Right for America’s Poor?
We were doing a bit of reading on inequality and ran across an article by the Economist, the thesis of which was that larger firms lead to rising inequality.
To show this rising inequality, they displayed a graph of the change (as %) in inflation-adjusted wages for American workers, broken into the top through bottom quintiles:
When one looks very closely at the graph (we almost missed it!), one sees a very surprising result that the Economist doesn’t mention.
Is the US Corporate Tax System Fair?
The US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world… but some profitable corporations pay nothing at all in taxes. What’s going on?