Poor at 20, poor for life, By Alana Semuels, July 14, 2016, The Atlantic: “It’s not an exaggeration: It really is getting harder to move up in America. Those who make very little money in their first jobs will probably still be making very little decades later, and those who start off making middle-class wages have similarly limited paths. Only those who start out at the top are likely to continue making good money throughout their working lives. That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, two economists at the University of Massachusetts in Boston…”
Tag: Income mobility
Upward Mobility
An atlas of upward mobility shows paths out of poverty, By David Leonhardt, Amanda Cox and Claire Cain Miller, May 4, 2015, New York Times: “In the wake of the Los Angeles riots more than 20 years ago, Congress created an anti-poverty experiment called Moving to Opportunity. It gave vouchers to help poor families move to better neighborhoods and awarded them on a random basis, so researchers could study the effects. The results were deeply disappointing. Parents who received the vouchers did not seem to earn more in later years than otherwise similar adults, and children did not seem to do better in school. The program’s apparent failure has haunted social scientists and policy makers, making poverty seem all the more intractable. Now, however, a large new study is about to overturn the findings of Moving to Opportunity. Based on the earnings records of millions of families that moved with children, it finds that poor children who grow up in some cities and towns have sharply better odds of escaping poverty than similar poor children elsewhere…”
Income Inequality
Income inequality and the ills behind it, By Eduardo Porter, July 29, 2014, New York Times: “Is it time to stop obsessing about inequality? Perhaps it was President Obama’s speech last December, calling the nation’s vast income gap ‘the defining challenge of our time.’ The American publication of the French economist Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ must have helped. Whatever the reason, suddenly inequality seems to be not only at the top of the liberal agenda, but in the thoughts of concerned American voters. Yet amid the denunciations of inequity as the major evil of our era, persistent voices — mostly but not exclusively from the political right — have been nibbling away at the concern over distribution . . .”