In America, there is a strongly held conviction that with hard work, anyone can make it into the middle class. Pew recently found that Americans are far more likely than people in other countries to believe that work determines success, as opposed to other factors beyond an individual’s control. But this positivity comes with a negative side — a tendency to pathologize those living in poverty.
Mayor Bill de Blasio's vision for the five boroughs is to move past the "tale of two cities," to create "a city where everyone has a shot at the middle class," he said during his State of the City address earlier this month.
But just who is part of New York City's middle class? It is not an exact science. Here's why. [...]
A City Council report from 2013, however, expanded the definition of middle class upward to a family earning roughly $200,000.
Boosting the federal minimum wage would be great news for the workers who’d receive a higher paycheck. Not so much for those who’d be out of a job. That anxiety sums up much of the debate around increasing the minimum wage.
(New York, NY) – On the heels of the nation’s most expensive mid-term election cycle, where federal political spending hit a $3.7 billion high, the national public policy organization Demos released a new report that examines the inherent racial bias in our big money political system.
One of the issues that helped fuel last week's national fast-food workers strikes is the growing income disparity between rank-and-file workers and the chief executives in charge of those multi-billion-dollar companies.
(NEW YORK, NY) – Following the nation’s most expensive mid-term election cycle, where political spending hit an unprecedented $3.7 billion high, the national public policy organization Demos has released a new report on the federal election spending of big box retail companies.
Branko Milanovic is a World Bank economist and development specialist. He's currently a visiting presidential professor at CUNY's Graduate Center and a senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center. His book, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, examines—as the title suggests—income inequality. Milanovic and Demos Research Assistant Sean McElwee recently discussed Milanovic's research and the major shifts within the inequality research field.
The soaring pay of corporate chief executives is spurring efforts to pass laws to limit their compensation and close the widening gap in earnings between workers and top executives.
Such laws have been proposed in at least three states, including Massachusetts, as well as in Switzerland. Proponents have yet to succeed in enacting these measures, but they vow to keep pressing the issue. [...]
For a moment last week, it looked like Walmart CEOs were getting enlightened. The company promised to “end minimum-wage pay” for its lowest-paid sales workers and touted a plan to ‘”invest in its associate base” and maybe even offer more bonus opportunities.
Six years after America sank into the deepest economic downturn since the 1930s, the jobless rate has fallen to 5.9 percent, the lowest since July 2008. But one demographic group — African-American men — seems to be stuck in a permanent recession.
How bad a problem is inequality? Are working-class people getting screwed? Should we raise taxes on the rich? Is the United States, in short, a fundamentally unfair place? These are the questions that keep awake policy analysts and fuel endless dinner-party debates. But there's one group that is not losing very much sleep over them: rich folks.
On Sept. 21, an estimated crowd of 100,000 people will flood the streets of Midtown Manhattan to march together on a single issue: climate change. The People’s Climate March, taking place two days before the UN’s global summit on climate, is the culmination of 6 months of planning and outreach by a growing coalition, ranging from labor unions to racial justice and indigenous organizations to tried-and-true environmental groups.
A number of states have laws demanding citizens produce documentary evidence of citizenship to register to vote. These laws have far-reaching implications for voter participation in our democracy.