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How Many Starving Kids Are Your Suede Shoes Worth?
I wanted to use this exercise to develop a bit of empathy for some others in our political communities.
Now while it is of course true that the things you care most about are definitely the objectively important ones, let’s cut everyone else some slack for being so wrong, eh?
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.
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 Outsourcing Good for the Poor?
Job outsourcing tends to be one of the few things that Americans can unite around: over 80% of Americans oppose it.
Something to consider: what has outsourcing meant for the 1.3 billion people of China (where many outsourced jobs are absorbed)?