Inequality across the country, in two maps

Sep 27, 2012, 1:47 PM

Inequality across the country, in two maps

Posted by Dylan Matthews on September 24, 2012 at 2:48 pm

The Census has calculated the Gini coefficients — the standard measure of income inequality — for each state, and the results aren’t necessarily what you’d expect:

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

The dark purple areas are highly unequal and the light blue ones highly equal. New York is the most unequal state, followed by Connecticut, Louisiana and New Mexico (a motley crew if ever there was one), and Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, Hawaii and Vermont are the most equal. To some extent, this is a rural/urban divide. New York City has both a lot of poor people and a few extravagantly wealthy people, whereas there’s no metropolis in Wyoming full of extremely rich folks. More generally, top earners tend to live in cities, as do the poor, so it makes sense that urban areas would be more unequal.

How has this changed since the recession hit? I computed how much the Gini coefficient changed for each state between 2008 and 2011 to find out. The red states saw inequality rise and the blue ones saw it fall, with darker colors indicating larger rises/falls:

Again, inequality patterns make for some odd partners. Inequality fell the most in Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota, with North Dakota and Minnesota also faring well, but Delaware, Mississippi and three states in New England all saw declines as well. The most intense rises in inequality came in Nevada and New Mexico, two Sun Belt states very hard hit by the housing crash, but states from Michigan to Georgia to Maine also saw big increases. Most of the country, the pale pink in the map above, saw a mild increase. The only discernible pattern is that small states, unsurprisingly, saw bigger swings.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/24/inequality-across-the-country-in-two-maps/

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that their market based policies increase opportunity for those who may not already be at the top of the heap to at least advance themselves. That message of dynamism should appeal to those who want to advance in life, to those who are aspirational, more than the Democrats' message about being held down by the rich, or the "soft bigotry of low standards" offered through social democracy.

I suppose the divide is between those who see inequality being mostly due to rigging the system and those who see some of the inequality being due to natural inequality. If inequality is a social construction, then society can get rid of it thruogh collective action. If there is some natural basis for it, then we'll have to learn how to live with it or to come up with a system that fairly compensates people for their work while treating them equally under the law. We've thought capitalism in a liberal democracy was that system up until now, but, perhaps just because that system include organic (rather than controlled) value discovery, people are beginning to distrust it.

Inequality across the country, in two maps

If everyone would just work hard, that gap would disappear.

inequality will never disappear

I don't think that will work...

you are really into this inequality stuff

can't you see how we've built up the middle class?***

And what better way to determine excellence

being excellently wealthy is one way of being excellent

But the excellent people aren't reproducing

Barry is pretty good at producing more poor people for sure***

which is why Republicans should be making the case...

Some folks are more equal than others.***

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