Inequality

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• Wealth gap
• *Separate And Unequal: The Kerner Commission 50 Years Later
  Fifty years later, the Kerner Commission report is again big news. Many of the issues it raised still exist in American society today and it’s unclear what role the federal government should play or might be expected to play to help address institutional racism. We revisit the recommendations of the Kerner Commission in the context of the ongoing struggle for racial equality. Host Joshua Johnson. Guests: Steven Gillon History professor, University of Oklahoma; author of numerous books, including his newest "Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism"; resident historian for The History Channel. Valerie Wilson Director, Economic Policy Institute's Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE); @ValerieRWilson Ronald Davis Past director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) during Obama administration; Executive Director, Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing; Retired police captain; current principal, 21st century policing LLC; @rondaviscp
• A modest proposal to solve inequality
  George Will, 2/2/2017 Will begins his column with a theme from Walter Scheidel's “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century”, that the tendency in stable, peaceful and prosperous societies is for elites to become entrenched and adept at using entrenchment to augment their advantages. The most potent “solutions” to this problem are disruptions such as wars, revolutions and plagues that have egalitarian consequences by fracturing society’s crust, opening fissures through which those who had been held down can rise.
• Busting The Myth Of The American Dream: Meet William Darity (48 min)
  Anita Rao & Frank Stasio, WUNC The State of Things, April 10, 2017 Why are some people rich and others poor? Answering this elusive question has been the lifelong work of economist William (Sandy) Darity.
• Car Insurance Companies Charge Higher Rates in Some Minority Neighborhoods
  First-of-its-kind data analysis finds price differences that can't be explained by risk alone By Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Lauren Kirchner, and Surya Mattu of ProPublica Consumer Reports and ProPublica; Last updated: April 21, 2017
• Diane Rehm Show - Joseph Stiglitz: “The Great Divide”
  Joseph Stiglitz: “The Great Divide” (Rebroadcast) Diane Rehm Show, Monday, Jan 18 2016 "Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has spent a career thinking about how to address income inequality. One major reason: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Stiglitz says King saw the struggle for social justice as a battle not just against racial segregation and discrimination, but also as one for greater economic equality and justice for all Americans. In a recent book, Stiglitz examines the causes and consequences of an unequal society and offers solutions for what we can do about it. For this Martin Luther King Day, a conversation with Joseph Stiglitz on “The Great Divide” in America." Guest Joseph Stiglitz winner of the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001, professor of economics at Columbia University and author of "Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy." Includes an excerpt from Dr. Stiglitz's book "The Great Divide".
• Disney Heiress Calls For Wealth Tax: 'We Have To Draw A Line' (8 min)
  Ari Shapiro, NPR All Things Considered, June 28, 2019
  Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Roy Disney, co-founder of the multibillion-dollar entertainment conglomerate that bears her family name, was one of 18 people in the top one-tenth of the wealthiest 1% who first signed a recent letter to the 2020 presidential candidates supporting a tax for households with $50 million or more in assets.
• Frontline - Why the Middle Class Matters | #TheDeck (2 min)
  PBS/Frontline/Marketplace - Are you in the middle class? The numbers might say otherwise.
• How economic inequality harms societies
  We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust. TEDGlobal2011, July 2011
• How Our Tax Code Makes Inequality Worse
  It has been engineered to promote inequality by providing mortgage interest deductions and other subsidies to people who don't need them. Thomas M. Shapiro, May 17, 2017, Moyers & Co. One of the ways in which wealth is redistributed upwards to the wealthiest among us today is via the mortgage interest deduction, a point illustrated by sociologist Matthew Desmond in a New York Times Magazine piece earlier this month. In a new book entitled Toxic Inequality: How America’s Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, & Threatens Our Future, sociologist Thomas Shapiro digs more deeply into the issue from the perspective of that other yawning gap in American society today: the racial wealth gap. Shapiro explains that the mortgage interest deduction, while the biggest driver of economic inequality, is not the only one baked into our tax code. He outlines how retirement savings and health insurance tax deductions also favor high earners, who are predominantly white Americans.
• Hunter High School Is 9 Percent Black or Hispanic. Why Isn’t It Part of the Diversity Debate?
  Elizabeth A. Harris, NY Times, Aug. 21, 2018 In the debate over admissions to New York City’s most prestigious high schools, Hunter College High School, one of the most academically rigorous public schools in New York City, has largely flown under the radar. But its demographics are just as skewed as those at Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science or the other specialized schools, where white and Asian students dominate. In a public school system where 67 percent of students are black or Hispanic, estimates for this school year show that 6.3 percent of Hunter High School students are Hispanic; 2.2 percent are black.
• Looking Back On 50 Years Of Busing In Boston (11 min)
  Audie Cornish, NPR, Oct 5, 2016 It's been more than 60 years since the Supreme Court's landmark case Brown v. Board of Education ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional — a watershed moment for the modern civil rights movement in America. Yet 2016 began with one of the nation's top educators — the secretary of education — declaring that the job of desegregating the nation's public schools is far from over: "There are communities around this country that have schools that are more segregated today than they were 10 years or 20 years ago," John B. King Jr. said in January. I know this, in part, because I was in a desegregation program as a kid: a school busing program in Boston that is still going today.
• Marketplace: How the Deck Is Stacked
  “How the Deck Is Stacked” is a collaborative and multiplatform series, jointly funded by PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Helmed by Kai Ryssdal, we investigate the new American economy, the forces that are shaping it, and the lives of the people living in it as we head into the 2016 elections and beyond. Episodes: Overcoming racial and economic struggle in Philadelphia, Mississippi (16 min); The Edelmans: 50 years of fighting for equality (4 min); The other Cleveland: Crossing the divide (11 min); Far from convention lights, life in Cleveland, Mississippi (11 min); Why the middle class has less money and bigger bills (4 min); What it feels like to be a middle class family today (12 min)
• Mark Mather and Beth Jarosz - The Demography of Inequality in the United States
  The Demography of Inequality in the United States
  Mark Mather and Beth Jarosz
  Population Reference Bureau, November 2014
  
  Page has links to full report, webinar, interactive graphics, and more.
• NC Environmental Justice Film Tour – From Witness To Action
  2015
• Opportunity, Responsibility, and security: A consensus plan for reducing poverty and restoring the American dream
  American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Brookings Institution Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity, 2015 "No side has a monopoly on the truth, but each side can block legislative action. We therefore created a working group of top experts on poverty, evenly balanced between progressives and conservatives (and including a few centrists). We obtained sponsorship and financial support from the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. We worked together for fourteen months, drawing on principles designed to maximize civility, trust, and open-mindedness within the group. We knew that the final product would reflect compromises made by people of good will and differing views."
• Richard Wilkinson books
  The Inner Level: Why is the incidence of mental illness in the UK twice that in Germany? Why are Americans three times more likely than the Dutch to develop gambling problems? Why is child well-being so much worse in New Zealand than Japan? As this groundbreaking study demonstrates, the answer to all these hinges on inequality. In The Spirit Level Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett put inequality at the centre of public debate by showing conclusively that less-equal societies fare worse than more equal ones across everything from education to life expectancy. The Inner Level now explains how inequality affects us individually, how it alters how we think, feel and behave. It sets out the overwhelming evidence that material inequalities have powerful psychological effects: when the gap between rich and poor increases, so does the tendency to defi ne and value ourselves and others in terms of superiority and inferiority. A deep well of data and analysis is drawn upon to empirically show, for example, that low social status is associated with elevated levels of stress, and how rates of anxiety and depression are intimately related to the inequality which makes that status paramount. Wilkinson and Pickett describe how these responses to hierarchies evolved, and why the impacts of inequality on us are so severe. In doing so, they challenge the conception that humans are innately competitive and self-interested. They undermine, too, the idea that inequality is the product of 'natural' differences in individual ability. This book sheds new light on many of the most urgent problems facing societies today, but it is not just an index of our ills. It demonstrates that societies based on fundamental equalities, sharing and reciprocity generate much higher levels of well-being, and lays out the path towards them.
• Science Magazine special issue: The Science of Inequality
  Science's special section on the science of inequality uses fresh waves of data to explore the origins, impact, and future of inequality around the world.
  23 May 2014
• State of Things - The One Percent: Power, Politics, And America's Changing Democracy
  Will Michaels and Frank Stasio, The State of Things, rebroadcast June 8, 2016 Many experts point to the way in which the so-called "one percent" have used their economic power to tighten their grip on privilege as one reason for the widening gap. Two of the key players are David and Charles Koch, who in 1980 started to spend millions to elect conservative libertarians to all levels of American government. Jane Mayer chronicles this rise of money in politics in her new book "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right" (Doubleday/2016). Host Frank Stasio talks with Mayer, a staff writer with The New Yorker, about "Dark Money" and the rise of money in politics over the last four decades. He continues the conversation with Jeffrey Winters, professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of the book "Oligarchy" (Cambridge University Press/2011). Winters argues the United States is both a democracy and oligarchy, thanks to the power of money in government.
• Structures of Inequality: A Focused Look at Systems of Racism
  Structures of Inequality: A Focused Look at Systems of Racism
  The longstanding realities of systemic racism are being laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing police violence. Issues of injustice and inequality are broad, deep, and interconnected.
  
  Systemic Racism and Health Disparities
  Geni Eng, Professor Gillings School of Global Public Health, Thursday, August 27
  
  Systemic Racism and Education
  Constance Lindsay, Assistant Professor of Education, Thursday, September 10
  
  Systemic Racism and Criminal Justice
  Frank Baumgartner, Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Wednesday, September 23
  
  Systemic Racism and Economic Disparities
  Heather Hunt, Research Associate with the NC Poverty Research Fund, Thursday, October 8
  
  Systemic Racism and Voting
  Jim Leloudis, Professor of History and Peter T. Grauer Associate Dean for Honors Carolina, Tuesday, October 20
  
  Systemic Racism and The Way We Think
  Keith Payne, Professor of Psychology and Neuropsychology, Monday, November 2
  
• Study By MIT Economist: U.S. Has Regressed To A Third-World Nation For Most Of Its Citizens
  Yossarian Johnson, The Intellectualist, Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, believes the ongoing death of “middle America” has sparked the emergence of two countries within one, the hallmark of developing nations.
• The Demography of Inequality in the United States
  The Demography of Inequality in the United States Mark Mather and Beth Jarosz, Population Reference Bureau, November 2014. Plus special online features
• The Dream Hoarders: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality
  Richard V. Reeves, Boston Review, May 30, 2017. This essay is excerpted with permission from Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard Reeves, Brookings Institution Press, 2017.
• What Politicians And Pundits Get Wrong About White Working Class Voters
  The 1A, with Joshua Johnson, May 22, 2017. Worldwide, populist nationalist movements are gaining traction. Why? Law professor Joan Williams says it’s because professional elites — including journalists and establishment politicians — remain clueless about the working class. In a new book, Williams explains why so many white blue-collar voters feel like strangers in their own countries, ignored by mainstream politicians and reporters, and what can be done about it. Joan Williams Distinguished professor of law and director of the Work Life Law Center, University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Her books include: "White Working Class" and "Unbending Gender: Why family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It" @JoanCWilliams
• What’s to be done about rising inequality?
  TM Scanlon. "The 4 biggest reasons why inequality is bad for society"
  
  Sir Paul Collier, "The economist Sir Paul Collier has spent his career thinking about how to solve global poverty. So how are we doing? Well, not as badly as you might think. He describes the current state of the world and shares thoughts on where we might usefully focus next."
• Where Children Rarely Escape Poverty
  Charlotte, North Carolina, ranks low on upward mobility, but the city is trying to make the American Dream more accessible. Emily DeRuy and Janie Boschma, The Atlantic, Mar 7, 2016 The Triangle also ranked low in the Harvard study.
• Why American Schools Are Even More Unequal Than We Thought
  Susan Dynarski, The Upshot, NY Times, Aug 12, 2016 Education is deeply unequal in the United States, with students in poor districts performing at levels several grades below those of children in richer areas. Yet the problem is actually much worse than these statistics show, because schools, districts and even the federal government have been using a crude yardstick for economic hardship.
• Women most at risk as wealth inequality gets 'out of control,' Oxfam warns
  Pan Pylas, Associated Press / National Post, Jan 21, 2019.
  Billionaire fortunes increased by 12 per cent last year -- the equivalent of $2.5 billion a day -- while the 3.8 billion people who make up the world's poorest half saw their wealth decline by 11 per cent.
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