Why Can’t We Close The Racial Wealth Gap?

If the college cheating scandal has reinforced anything, it’s that one of the primary advantages of being wealthy is that the wealthy can buy more advantages. This helps explain why African Americans, who’ve historically been denied wealth, lag in almost every category of society behind whites, who have ... Read more

Fixing Inequality: More Opportunity Is Not The Answer

Public discussions of reducing inequality have largely focused on equalizing the opportunities for people to move up, on ideas such as universal pre-K, school reform, reducing college debt, fighting discrimination, affirmative action, training programs, opportunity zones, and career ... Read more

What States Can Do to Reduce Poverty And Inequality Through Tax Policy

States have an opportunity to act to close the loopholes that hide and protect the wealth of the top 1%, remedy the impact of the new federal tax law that lowers taxes on the wealthy, and make critical investments in infrastructure, energy systems, and programs that create ... Read more

How The Age Of Billionaires Ends

Serious proposals are on the table to address the deepening divide between the uber-rich and the rest of us. Every month or so there’s a stunning new headline statistic about just how stark our economic divide has become. Understanding that this divide exists is a good start. Appreciating that a deeply unfair ... Read more

Do We Really Need Billionaires?

In March 2018, Forbes reported that it had identified 2,208 billionaires from 72 countries and territories. Collectively, this group was worth $9.1 trillion, an increase in wealth of 18 percent since the preceding year. Americans led the way with a record 585 billionaires, followed by mainland China which, ... Read more

By the Best Definition, The Poverty Rate Should Be Tripled

The World Bank defines poverty as “pronounced deprivation in well-being,” not only of material needs but also of health and education and security and public voice and the “opportunity to better one’s life” and the “capability of the individual to ... Read more

Research Shows Affluent Americans Barely Recognize US Income Gap

A new report from the Federal Reserve highlights the bleak economic prospects for young Americans, concluding that millennials are in much worse financial shape than earlier generations (at the same age) in terms of their relative income and wealth. These findings are not ... Read more

Tale Of Two Depressions

Mainstream economists continue to discuss the two great crises of capitalism during the past century just like the pillars of society performed in the brothel—a “house of infinite mirrors and theaters”—in Jean Genet’s The Balcony.* The order they represent is indeed threatened by an uprising in the streets, and the only ... Read more

What Does Inequality Cost The Average American? About $150K

Belgian waffles. Belgian beers. Americans love ’em. But what Americans really need from Belgium has nothing to do with beer or breakfast treats. We need Belgium’s much more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The English philosopher Francis Bacon once long ago compared wealth to manure. ... Read more

Fixing The Crisis Of ‘Runaway Wealth’

The next Congress faces a stunning array of challenges — on health care, gun policy, climate change, you name it. One crucial challenge starved of attention, however, is what I call runaway inter-generational wealth. That’s where the wealth of a country’s richest families snowballs from one generation to the ... Read more