A new paper by Colgate economist Michael R. Haines uses infant and childhood mortality rates to trace inequality in the U.S. in the 20th century. Haines reaches an interesting conclusion: “The evidence shows that, although there have been large?absolute reductions in the level of infant and child mortality rates and also a reduction in the absolute levels of differences across socioeconomic groups, relative inequality has not diminished over the 20th century.”[%comments]
Lasting Inequality
TAGS: income, inequality
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THE term Inequality is somewhat misleading. The situation in US is vast majority of People in US such as: carpenters, nurses, writers, bus drivers, teachers, editors, plumbers, waitress etc are working poor.
Just 1% of US population is worry free.
The trouble is many working poor Americans pretending to be upper class.
Could it be that soon after the civil rights bill was passed, employers moved jobs overseas?
There is always a lot of hand waving on this issue, but numbers are scarce. Here is a “pocket” fact to keep in mind.
2.5% of the US population owns 50% of the wealth–and 50% of the US population owns 2.5% of the wealth.
I think I must be missing something here, what is so freakish about this “finding?”
Neither relative differences nor absolute differences between infant mortality rates are useful indicators of whether infant mortality inequalities have changed in a meaningful sense. All standard measures of differences between rates tend to be affected by the overall prevalence of an outcome. As an outcome decreases in overall prevalence, solely for reasons related to the shape of the risk distributions, relative differences in experiencing it tend to increase while relative differences in avoiding it tend to decline. Absolute differences tend also be systematically affected by the overall prevalence of an outcome, though in a more complicated way. For fuller explanations see the (1) Measuring Health Disparities, (2) Scanlan’s Rule, and (3) Mortality and Survival pages of jpscanlan.com. As to whether disparities in infant mortality have changed in a meaningful sense, see Section A.7 of the Scanlan’s Rule page.
Welfare-reform-as-we-got-it has been a powerful tool for strengthening inequality while effectively hiding data about those at the bottom.