Tag

income inequality

#SaveBmore – Why You’re Only Hearing About Income Inequality Now

By | #SaveBmore, Tinted Lens | 6 Comments

Income inequality is rattling around the collective consciousness of late on the backs of President Obama’s remarks and Pope Francis’ denunciation of trickle-down economics in the first lengthy writing of his papacy. The gap between the poor and the super-rich in the United States has been steadily widening for decades but only recently has it risen to the top of the agenda for the media, citizens and politicians.

Why? Why only now? Why has this issue been largely ignored for so long?

Because the effects of the wealth gap for the past several decades have mostly been felt by people of color.

Here is where I could trot out the numbers highlighting how the middle class has shrunk since the 1960’s, the map of the U.S. if land were distributed by wealth, the comparison of CEO pay ratios, or the number of hours of minimum wage earning it takes to afford an apartment. But I’ll leave that for others.

According to the 2008 census, in Baltimore City, half of all African-American households earned less than $35,000 per year, while only one-third of white households fell under this low-income threshold. The prevalence of poverty among black city residents is almost double that for whites. While the Black middle class makes up 40 percent of the African-American population, this has always lagged behind the number of middle-class whites. This smaller number of middle class citizens is attributable to the wealth gap between blacks and whites. In 1984 there was an $85,000 difference in the wealth of white households over their black counterparts determined by an Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) study; over the following 25 years, it ballooned to $236,500. That’s a $151,500 increase!

IASP attributed the national wealth gap to home ownership, household income, unemployment, and financial support/inheritance while writings on Baltimore have highlighted education, pathways to careers and discriminatory hiring practices as our major obstacles. In a city that is 70 percent black, this level of poverty and inequality drags the entire city down.

How do we save our sinking city? Well, according to the Baltimore Ethical Society, we can overcome our apathy and get mad about it. Spread the YouTube video on inequality; if you’re in a position to hire, re-examine how you’re evaluating candidates of color; mentor disadvantaged youth, or better yet, give them apprenticeship opportunities if you work in a trade. Consider cooperatives as your next start-up business model and utilize Community Wealth by looking to and building on a neighborhood’s existing assets.

The shocking thing is, what will #SaveBmore is already here (as my fellow ChangeEngine blogger Robyn Stegman argues). We have the population, we have the innovators, and we have the entrepreneurial spirit. What we need is for the two Baltimores to talk to one another and we’ll set the world on fire.

The Architecture of Our Psychological Health

By | Health, The Global Is Local | 4 Comments

A beautiful old mansion would be easier to redevelop than a home where someone was murdered.

This week’s post by Lindsey Davis spurred me to think again about how our environment influences the way we experience the world around us, and the impact it has on our lives. Lindsey points out the balance that is struck when planners and city leaders determine that a neighborhood or area of the city would be better demolished than repaired.

Perhaps, she argues, these parts of the city should start a new story, free from the architecture that haunts their past.

I think she is probably right. Their present is the part that I have been thinking about, though, and the impact that living with a history and an environment may have upon the residents in any neighborhood. Each of us experiences Baltimore in a different way, and so that architectural impact is different for all of us, depending on our habits and our pre-existing constitution. Many of us cut a fairly narrow slice of the Baltimore pie (or whichever city or pastry you live in), because of where we work, study, play, or live, and the locations and routes between these activities vary for all of us.

This past weekend, the Baltimore Marathon (which I watched, but did not run) wound it’s way through much of the city, hitting the Inner Harbor, Druid Hill, Waverly, and many miles in between. The Baltimore Bike Party often has a similarly winding route, and I appreciate that both attempt to expose both residents and guests to parts of the city that typically do not get seen by tourists, commuters, and — more often than not — white people like myself.

There is no way to understand the city from the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, or from the Inner Harbor, or from the Under Armor headquarters. The particular portions of the city that Lindsey makes reference to are not pretty, and in fact may be derelict or downright abandoned, but are integral to understanding what makes this place. Neighborhoods stricken by urban blight have an enormous impact on the financial, social, and psychological health of the city.

From a public health standpoint (which, I have argued before, is perhaps the best lens through which to analyse a human population), there are a number of concerns that urban blight brings up, including correlation with poverty, high disease burden, low literacy rates, crime and violence incidence, access to food and services.. the list goes on, of course. However, an issue that is harder to quantify is the psychological impact of a blighted neighborhood.

A 2002 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry linked found statistically significant associations between the built environment and rates of depression. Another study published in 2002, this one in the Journal of Social Science & Medicine,  found that “neighborhood disadvantage was associated with higher rates of major depression and substance abuse disorder” among other negative psycho-social conditions.

This is not surprising. Think about your own home, and your favorite room or space in it. What are a few of the things that you like about it? Pick two or three of them and then meet me at the next paragraph…

Hi, welcome back. Although I can’t be sure, I strongly suspect that the things you like about your favorite room in your house have to do with beauty, comfort, positive memories or associations, or attractiveness. Now reverse that scenario, imagine your least favorite part of your home, and I would again be willing to bet a bowl of freshly roasted pumpkin seeds that the space you just identified has negative connotations, gives you feelings of dread, disappointment, or even disgust (if you’re struggling to get your walls out of the 1970s, I hear wood paneling looks great with a coat of white paint). Now scale these impressions to a street or a neighborhood, and the correlation with psycho-sociological outcomes starts to make a lot of sense.

It all comes back to the poverty/wealth disparity, in my opinion. Will money make you happy? Certainly not in isolation, but if it buys/rents you a decent place on an attractive street in a part of the city with strong civic engagement, then you’ve probably got a head-start on happiness compared to someone who lives sandwiched between abandoned buildings, has to rely on an unpredictable bus system to get to their job, and lives in one of only a half dozen occupied homes in a three block radius. Besides, once you’re in that nice neighborhood, there’s a good chance that grocery stores will be easier to get to, crime rates will drop, and transportation options will be better (well, maybe that last one is a stretch…).

The question that lingers for me is one that Lindsey also raised — is there a point where the “institutional memory” of a place is so malign that the only recourse is to remove the architecture of those memories? According to Lindsey, that may be the case. The individuals who collectively hold and live these institutional memories may be the most compelling reasons of all, however. Preserving a neighborhood of decay and bad memories is no way to effectively raise morale and standard of living. Instead, city planners may hope to cause social change through infrastructure improvements, a tired, but tried and true strategy that has had positive results in the past.

Reaching for the American Dream

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | One Comment

Last week a video on wealth inequality in the US went viral. It shows the stark differences between the way Americans think wealth is distributed now, the way they think it should be, and the way it really is. It raises a compelling point: many Americans are unaware of the serious extremes of wealth  in the U.S.

The realities of wealth in America are incredibly different from our common narrative. In a country that puts a spoonful of the American Dream in every child’s bottle, we are raised to believe that wealth is acquired through hard work, an entrepreneurial spirit, determination and perhaps a little luck. A 2012 Pew Research Center report found that 68 percent of Americans agreed that “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.” The wealth gap then is perhaps not such a problem because anyone in America could wake up every morning and dive in for a swim in their massive wealth of gold coins if they put in enough time, energy, and creativity to make it happen.

Yet some research reveals major holes in this view of our great country. America is not the dream of economic mobility that we promote in the brochures. Intergenerational earnings elasticity shows how well a father’s earnings is a predictor to the earnings of his son. In other words how does the economic status of your birth affect how much money you can make when you grow up. The higher the number the lower the economic mobility. As you can see in the chart below the United States is pretty low on the economic mobility pole when compared with other developed countries.

Furthermore a report by Miles Corak from the Center for American Progress suggests that the increase in wealth inequality actually leads to a decrease in opportunity. Contrary to the point of view that the increasing gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of America is incentivizing people to increase their personal wealth, this report shows that there is a correlation between income inequality and a decrease in economic mobility called the “Great Gatsby Curve.”

CorakMiddleClass_fig1

The report looks at three contributors to economic mobility:

  • Your family‘s ability to invest in your future 
  • The resources and incentives available to you in the market
  • The investments provided by the state to promote economic mobility

Let’s just look at the first of these three factors. If more and more wealth is held by fewer and fewer people then there are fewer and fewer families with the resources to invest in their child’s future and fewer and fewer children with the education, support, and resources they need to move up the ladder. While we like to promote the idea that the world’s billionaires made their fortune with their own sweat, many of them got a huge head start with privileges they received by the sheer lottery of their birth. One of the biggest is access to credit and access to capital, which often comes from their parents. It’s a lot easier to build wealth when you have a little to begin with. Again, as less and less wealth is held in the hands of the many, that means there are fewer resources for more people to build wealth, and thus less economic mobility.

Less wealth also means less economic stability. This chart, tweeted by Amir Sufi at the University of Chicago, shows how the recession affected people at different income levels. Those with a lot of wealth depend less and less on their incomes and have a lot more to fall back in times of economic hardship. An economic recession can serve to widen economic inequalities.

SufiChart

 

The only thing more troubling then the lack of upward mobility in the US, is the number of families experiencing downward mobility. Now more people are struggling just to maintain their economic existence. They are not moving up the ladder but preventing themselves from falling into the chute of poverty. Pew Research data shows that the medium income and net worth is falling and 85 percent of the middle class in America report it is harder to maintain their lifestyle. As part of the first generation to be worse off then the one before, I was making substantially less then my parents made in their first jobs out of college. Daniel Luzer quotes David Frum’s brilliant description of the American worker in his article on The Social Mobility Fairytale:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today’s money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He’s working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you’ll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year.

As incomes fall, the ability to build something for yourself diminishes because you are now struggling just to meet basic needs. The part of the narrative of the American Dream I love is the idea that we all possess the talent, creativity, resources, and ability to make it big. I love that I live in a country where invention and entrepreneurship is celebrated above all else. I also love the idea that we are a country where everyone can create a good life if they work hard enough. We’re not talking about being the next Bill Gates, but just having that white picket fence or whatever success looks like to you. Yet the growing wealth gap in the United States is stealing that dream from most of us. It is becoming harder and harder for the average person to build wealth no matter how hard or smart they work.

The question then is how do we go about closing the gap and ensuring everyone has the resources they need for economic mobility? From the very beginning I’ve looked at how to forge an economy that allows us all to meet our needs while building a healthy community. In my next post I’ll explore a diversity of solutions that specifically tackle this problem of wealth inequality in America. Until then I’d appreciate your thoughts below on how you think we should tackle this growing problem.

To be continued…

 

IMAGE CREDIT. Courtesy of Vasenka.