The Pension Pinch
A new survey reveals just how severely the United States’ pension system is failing its retirees.
Winter 2023
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Ferguson Revisited
One year after the death of Michael Brown, the conditions that made Ferguson shorthand for economic, political, and carceral injustice remain unchanged.
JPMorgan Sounds the Alarm on Inequality
When even the big banks start to worry about inequality, you know something is seriously wrong.
Border City Blues
It is no coincidence that the starkest reactions to police violence—from Ferguson to Baltimore—have flared in cities strung along the Mason-Dixon Line.
How Racism Became Policy in Ferguson
The Justice Department report offers a glimpse of the systematically oppressive and petty policing in Ferguson. But in order to fully understand how racism became policy in the St. Louis suburbs, we need to look at the history of suburban development itself.
Mapping Our Unequal States
The “suspension bridge” of top income shares (based on the work of Thomas Piketty and colleagues) is by now a familiar icon of American inequality. In this rendering, top-end inequality (measured as the share of national income going to the …
The Segregation Index
Percentage of black residents in Ferguson, Missouri: 67 Of black police officers: 5.7 Percentage of traffic stops targeting black residents in Ferguson: 86 Of arrests: 93 Distance in miles from Ferguson to St. Louis suburb of Ladue: 10 Rank of …
Declining Cities, Declining Unions: Urban Sprawl and U.S. Inequality
Cities offer the natural solidarities of work and neighborhood that make sustained organizing possible. Their decline spells disaster for American labor.
Segregation’s Long Shadow
What is remarkable in Ferguson is not just the way segregation has been sustained, but the way it maps so cleanly onto patterns of economic disadvantage.
The Making of Ferguson
Over the course of St. Louis’s history, local segregation was enforced by a tangle of public and private policies.
What This Month’s Jobs Report Doesn’t Tell Us
This month’s jobs report was widely celebrated for showing that—after adding 217,000 jobs in May 2014—the United States had finally returned to the December 2007 (pre-recession) level of employment. This is a useful comparative benchmark, underscoring the unusual depth and …
The Computer Did It? Technology and Inequality
There is nothing novel about the impact of technology on labor markets. So why do so many pundits insist on blaming computers and robots for today’s inequality?
