wealth
sastyk | October 20, 2011On the 31st of October we will officially reach 7 billion people on the earth. Over the next week or two we'll be talking a lot about population issues, and I wanted to start by doing a light revision of an article I wrote some years ago about a concept a lot of people don't grasp very well - the idea of demographic transition and what it means.
The term "Demographic Transition" describes the movement of human populations from higher initial birth rates to a stabilzed lower one, and seems to be a general feature of most societies over the last several hundred years.
Initially, birth rates…
sastyk | July 27, 2011And in non-goat news....
According to the study, the inflation-adjusted median wealth among Hispanic households fell 66% from 2005 to 2009. Black households suffered a 53% drop in net worth over the same period. By contrast, whites saw a decline of 16% in household wealth.
In 2009, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth. Hispanic families had about $6,325 in wealth. The average white household had a net worth of $113,149.
The study also showed that a third of black and Hispanic households had zero wealth, meaning that their debts were larger than the value of all their assets.…
sastyk | February 24, 2011Mother Jones has a very clear visual presentation of the increase in economic inequity over the last years - 11 charts they say shows it all. I'm not sure it shows it all, but they are well worth looking at, particularly these two:
And this one, which shows the perception that Americans have - that things are much more equal than they are.
Ultimately, the same battles being fought in the Middle East are going to be fought here - because with an ever-shrinking pie in an economy that will struggle to grow because of a declining resource base, there's no other option.
Sharon
stoat | April 14, 2010There is a very nice posting by CM about wealth and taxes. Striking: the right-wing complain that 47% of Americans pay no Federal tax. But the real problem is that the bottom 50% measured by wealth only hold 2.5% of the wealth, so no matter how hard you tax them you'll get very little.
razib | September 9, 2009Will Wilkinson points me to an interesting paper with some interesting figures, Income, Health and Wellbeing Around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll:
gregladen | August 31, 2009Good morning and welcome to another installment of "The Falsehoods." Today's falsehood is the assertion that the poor have more babies than the rich, or that the poor just have more babies to begin with. In comparison to ... whatever.
Now, before you rush off to the Internet and find some table or graph that shows higher fertility in women of lower SES than higher SES, or a high birth rate among Nigerians, I want to acknowledge right away that such evidence is easy to find, and it is easy to take that evidence and construct the obnoxious sentence that titles this post. Yes, that is all…