scholarly journals Income Inequality Across the Rural-Urban Continuum in the United States, 1970-2016

Author(s):  
Brian C. Thiede ◽  
Jaclyn L.W. Butler ◽  
David L. Brown ◽  
Leif Jensen

Since the 1970s, the U.S. has experienced dramatic increases in income inequality. Although this macro-level trend is well-established in research literature, less is known about subnational patterns of income inequality in the U.S., particularly as they vary between and within rural and urban localities. Using Census and ACS data, this study produces Gini estimates of within-county income inequality and examines these trends across a six-strata urban-rural typology from 1970 to 2016. This study finds the following. Income inequality has remained consistently higher in nonmetropolitan counties than metropolitan counties throughout the study period. However, levels of inequality have converged by 2016, a convergence that has been driven by increases in metropolitan counties. There are notable exceptions to the secular trend of increasing inequality. The central Plains region has experienced decreasing levels of inequality, and inequality in large, peripheral metropolitan counties lags noticeably behind other types of counties. Almost all low-inequality counties in 1970 have shifted to moderate- or high-inequality, such that almost no one lives in low-inequality places by 2016. This increase in exposure to inequality has been particularly dramatic among residents of large, central metropolitan counties. As the only county-level analysis to track income inequality across the rural-urban continuum from 1970 to 2016, this study lays the foundation for more sophisticated analyses that explain spatial variation in income inequality and that account for the demographic and economic diversity of the rural and urban United States.

Author(s):  
Mark Zeller ◽  
Karthik Gangavarapu ◽  
Catelyn Anderson ◽  
Allison R. Smither ◽  
John A. Vanchiere ◽  
...  

AbstractThe emergence of the early COVID-19 epidemic in the United States (U.S.) went largely undetected, due to a lack of adequate testing and mitigation efforts. The city of New Orleans, Louisiana experienced one of the earliest and fastest accelerating outbreaks, coinciding with the annual Mardi Gras festival, which went ahead without precautions. To gain insight into the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S. and how large, crowded events may have accelerated early transmission, we sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genomes during the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in Louisiana. We show that SARS-CoV-2 in Louisiana initially had limited sequence diversity compared to other U.S. states, and that one successful introduction of SARS-CoV-2 led to almost all of the early SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Louisiana. By analyzing mobility and genomic data, we show that SARS-CoV-2 was already present in New Orleans before Mardi Gras and that the festival dramatically accelerated transmission, eventually leading to secondary localized COVID-19 epidemics throughout the Southern U.S.. Our study provides an understanding of how superspreading during large-scale events played a key role during the early outbreak in the U.S. and can greatly accelerate COVID-19 epidemics on a local and regional scale.


Author(s):  
Paul Jesilow ◽  
Bryan Burton

Healthcare fraud involves wide-ranging illegal behaviors. It includes such activities as individual physicians who bill insurance companies or the government for services that were never provided, as well as corporate behavior, such as pharmaceutical companies that falsify clinical tests in order to get unsafe drugs approved for use. Thousands die each year in the United States due to these behaviors, including deaths from incorrectly prescribed medications or from tainted drugs that were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration based upon fraudulent testing and reporting. Thousands of additional patients likely are injured and killed by unnecessary surgeries performed by physicians who want to maximize their reimbursements. The illegal activities also add billions of dollars each year to the total healthcare cost in the U.S. Despite these costs, there is relatively little outrage as a result of the behaviors, largely because they remain hidden from public view. Healthcare fraud, as with almost all white-collar crime, is rarely detected and that prevents the frauds from becoming known to victims, law enforcement, and policy makers, which in turn prevents analysts from compiling a complete picture of the behaviors and prevents policymakers and law enforcement from developing efficient enforcement strategies. Moreover, the lack of detection assures perpetrators that they will get away with their crimes and limits the potential preventative effects of punishment. Lack of detection and reporting has been a particularly strong problem for those trying to control healthcare fraud and abuse in the United States and elsewhere. The enforcement mechanisms that have evolved have been strongly influenced by the difficulties of detecting the illegal behaviors.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Moller ◽  
Joya Misra

Social policy plays a central role in redistributing resources to ensure greater equality or at least increased opportunities for members of disadvantaged groups. This essay considers how the U.S. welfare state redistributes incomes through social policies, while reinforcing other forms of stratification. The essay begins by comparing inequality in the United States to other advanced industrialized countries, and shows that the level of income inequality is higher in the United States than in most of these nations. It then presents data on inequality in the United States by race and gender. Finally, it discusses how specific policies alter levels of inequality by redistributing income or institutionalizing sources of income inequality. In general, U.S. social policies help to reduce inequality, but they have limited effectiveness, particularly in comparison to other advanced industrialized countries, in reducing inequality by race, class, gender, and family structure.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (191) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalija Novta ◽  
Evgenia Pugacheva

We examine the extent to which declining manufacturing employment may have contributed to increasing inequality in advanced economies. This contribution is typically small, except in the United States. We explore two possible explanations: the high initial manufacturing wage premium and the high level of income inequality. The manufacturing wage premium declined between the 1980s and the 2000s in the United States, but it does not explain the contemporaneous rise in inequality. Instead, high income inequality played a large role. This is because manufacturing job loss typically implies a move to the service sector, for which the worker is not skilled at first and accepts a low-skill wage. On average, the associated wage cut increases with the overall level of income inequality in the country, conditional on moving down in the wage distribution. Based on a stylized scenario, we calculate that the movement of workers to low-skill service sector jobs can account for about a quarter of the increase in inequality between the 1980s and the 2000s in the United States. Had the U.S. income distribution been more equal, only about one tenth of the actual increase in inequality could have been attributed to the loss of manufacturing jobs, according to our simulations.


SURG Journal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-51
Author(s):  
Kathryn Swierzewski

This study examines the effect assortative mating by education has on income inequality by household. In contrast to the majority of other literature in this field which focus on the United States (U.S.) as a whole, this study makes use of state-level data to examine the marriage mating market with respect to education attainment. It also examines how homogamous partnerships increase income inequality across households by analyzing changes in the Gini coefficient over time. Panel data for this analysis is from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS-International and IPUMS-USA) from the U.S. Census of the Population. Assortative mating by education is shown in this analysis to be a contributing factor to increasing inequality among homogamous heterosexual partnerships in the U.S. from 1960 to 2005. Keywords: assortative mating; education level; United States (state-level, from 1960-2005); income inequality (household); labour economics; welfare economics


2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Priest

This paper analyzes the major debates over future petroleum supply in the United States, in particular the long-running feud between the world-famous geologist, M. King Hubbert, and the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Vincent E. McKelvey. The intellectual history of resource evaluation reveals that, by the mid-twentieth century, economists had come to control the discourse of defining a “natural resource.” Their assurances of abundance overturned earlier conceptions of petroleum supplies as fixed and finite in favor of a more flexible understanding of resource potential in a capitalist society and acceptance of the price elasticity of natural resources. In 1956, King Hubbert questioned these assurances by predicting that U.S. domestic oil production would peak around 1970, which drew him into a long-running debate with McKelvey and the so-called “Cornucopians.” When Hubbert’s Peak was validated in the mid-1970s, he became a prophet. The acceptance of Hubbert’s theory ensured the centrality of oil in almost all discourses about the future, and it even created a cultural movement of prophecy believers fixated on preparing for the oil end times. Although notions of resource cornucopia seem to be once again in ascendance in the United States, Hubbert’s Peak still haunts any consideration of humanity’s environmental future.


Author(s):  
Rosina Lozano

An American Language is a political history of the Spanish language in the United States. The nation has always been multilingual and the Spanish language in particular has remained as an important political issue into the present. After the U.S.-Mexican War, the Spanish language became a language of politics as Spanish speakers in the U.S. Southwest used it to build territorial and state governments. In the twentieth century, Spanish became a political language where speakers and those opposed to its use clashed over what Spanish's presence in the United States meant. This book recovers this story by using evidence that includes Spanish language newspapers, letters, state and territorial session laws, and federal archives to profile the struggle and resilience of Spanish speakers who advocated for their language rights as U.S. citizens. Comparing Spanish as a language of politics and as a political language across the Southwest and noncontiguous territories provides an opportunity to measure shifts in allegiance to the nation and exposes differing forms of nationalism. Language concessions and continued use of Spanish is a measure of power. Official language recognition by federal or state officials validates Spanish speakers' claims to US citizenship. The long history of policies relating to language in the United States provides a way to measure how U.S. visions of itself have shifted due to continuous migration from Latin America. Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are crucial arbiters of Spanish language politics and their successes have broader implications on national policy and our understanding of Americans.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-134

This section, updated regularly on the blog Palestine Square, covers popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict during the quarter 16 November 2017 to 15 February 2018: #JerusalemIstheCapitalofPalestine went viral after U.S. president Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced his intention to move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv. The arrest of Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi for slapping an Israeli soldier also prompted a viral campaign under the hashtag #FreeAhed. A smaller campaign protested the exclusion of Palestinian human rights from the agenda of the annual Creating Change conference organized by the US-based National LGBTQ Task Force in Washington. And, UNRWA publicized its emergency funding appeal, following the decision of the United States to slash funding to the organization, with the hashtag #DignityIsPriceless.


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