Half of Single Older Adults in U.S. Lack Income to Pay for Basic Needs
Published: | 8:57 pm | Posted in: Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty
Researchers tracking the economic security of America’s older adults have found that half who live alone and nearly a quarter of those living in two-person households where both are age 65 or older are unable to afford basic necessities without extra assistance. The 2019 Elder Index and a companion report, Insecurity in the States 2019, […]
Why Are So Many Households Unable to Cover a $400 Unexpected Expense?
Published: | 8:40 pm | Posted in: Poverty
Despite a strong economic recovery, about 40 percent of households in 2017 still said they would have trouble paying for a $400 unexpected expense. When households are operating under such a tight budget, building a nest egg for retirement can be challenging. This brief uses data from two Federal Reserve surveys – the Survey of […]
Trends in Retirement Security by Race/Ethnicity
Published: | 5:35 pm | Posted in: Minority Aging, Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty
Retirement security has declined in the wake of the global financial crisis and ensuing recession. Despite an extended period of recovery, half of households ages 30-59 are at risk of inadequate retirement income compared to 44 percent in 2007. The questions addressed in this brief are how the percentage at risk varies by race/ethnicity in […]
Flint: An American Failure
Published: | 9:25 pm | Posted in: Neoliberalism
The story of Flint—the Michigan city in which people were harmed by drinking water that contained lead and lethal bacteria—is a warning to all struggling US communities that confront disinvestment, declining population, excessive financial focus, incompetent leadership, nontransparent government, and racism. Flint is also a tale of a persevering community, good doctors and scientists, and […]
Developing Care: Recent Research on the Care Economy and Economic Development
Published: | 8:00 pm | Posted in: Poverty and Public Policy
Policy makers are beginning to appreciate the constraints that unpaid care work imposes on both economic development and the empowerment of women in low-income countries. Empirical research on these topics is in its infancy but is already yielding significant results. This paper contextualizes and reviews recent research on unpaid care work in the Global South, […]
Longevity Economics: Leveraging the Advantages of an Aging Society
Published: | 6:35 pm | Posted in: Inequality
An aging society is a fact for the United States, much of the developed world, and many developing countries. People are reaching traditional retirement ages with many years of expected life remaining and their functional capacity largely intact. Many of these people want to continue contributing to society through activities that are meaningful to the […]
In-Work Poverty in the United States
Published: | 6:26 pm | Posted in: Poverty
In-work poverty became a prominent policy issue in the United States long before the term itself acquired any meaning and relevance in other industrialized countries. With America’s embrace of an employment-centered antipoverty strategy, the working poor have become even more of an issue. This paper reviews some key trends, drivers and policy issues. How much […]
The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940
Published: | 6:20 pm | Posted in: Wealth
One of the defining features of the “American dream” is the aspiration that children have a higher standard of living than their parents. When children are asked to assess their economic progress, they frequently compare their own standard of living to that of their parents. Such measures of “absolute income mobility”—the fraction of children earning […]
The notion of precariousness among older adults living alone in the U.S.
Published: | 9:01 pm | Posted in: Inequality
This paper argues that older adults living alone in the U.S. face a set of unique challenges, as they are likely to experience a sense of precariousness. The term precariousness points to an intrinsic sense of instability and insecurity stemming from a lack of, or difficulty to, access essential resources. During a two-year ethnography of […]
Quality of life in the contemporary politics of healthcare: … but what is a life?
Published: | 8:57 pm | Posted in: Inequality
‘Quality of life’ (QoL) is a ubiquitous phrase in medicine. There is considerable literature on the meaning of ‘quality’ in ‘quality of life’, but little on the meaning of ‘life’. And yet, rooted in measurements of QoL, is a conceptualization of ‘a life’ used to judge ‘quality’. In this article I focus on ‘life’ within […]
Precarity in late life: Understanding new forms of risk and insecurity
Published: | 8:52 pm | Posted in: Inequality
Population aging and longevity in the context of declining social commitments, raises concerns about disadvantage and widening inequality in late life. This paper explores the concept of precarity as a means to understand new and sustained forms of risk and insecurity that affect late life. The article begins with a review of the definition and […]
The Decline in Lifetime Earnings Mobility in the U.S.: Evidence from Survey-Linked Administrative Data
Published: | 5:22 pm | Posted in: Inequality
Abstract There is a sizable literature that examines whether intergenerational mobility has declined as inequality has increased. This literature is motivated by a desire to understand whether increasing inequality has made it more difficult to rise from humble origins. An equally important component of economic mobility is the ability to move across the earnings distribution […]
Inequality in the long run
Published: | 5:49 pm | Posted in: Inequality
The distribution of income and wealth is a widely discussed and controversial topic. Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of income and wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the 19th century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later […]
How social democrats may become reluctant radicals: Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Wolfgang Streeck’s Buying Time
Published: | 6:23 pm | Posted in: Neoliberalism
Abstract The continuing ramifications of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 have forced social scientists to raise fundamental questions about the relationship between capitalism, democracy and inequality. In particular, Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Wolfgang Streeck’s Buying Time focus on, respectively, the economic and the political contradictions of capitalistic societies. Piketty argues that capitalism naturally tends towards […]
Family Options Study: Short-Term Impacts of Housing and Services Interventions for Homeless Families
Published: | 6:14 pm | Posted in: Poverty and Public Policy
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) undertook the Family Options Study to gather evidence about which types of housing and services interventions work best for homeless families. The study compares the effects of three active interventions— permanent housing subsidy (SUB), community-based rapid re-housing (CBRR), and project-based transitional housing (PBTH)—to one […]
Why the Surge in Income Inequality?
Published: | 6:13 pm | Posted in: Inequality
Income inequality is more severe in the United States than in any other affluent longstanding-democratic country, and it has increased sharply in the past generation. The rise in inequality is mainly a story of growing separation between households in the top 1 percent and those in the ‘‘bottom’’ 99 percent. Income inequality within the lower 99 […]
Inequality: What Can Be Done?
Published: | 6:30 pm | Posted in: Inequality
As discussed in Inequality: What Can Be Done?, the study of income inequality was “marginalized” in mainstream economics for much of the twentieth century. The most notable exception to this generalization is the work of Anthony B. Atkinson, the British economist who is the leading authority and pioneer of the economics of inequality. He even […]
Stumbling towards Stockholm
Published: | 6:27 pm | Posted in: Inequality
Lane Kenworthy believes that within the next half-century the United States will very likely become a “modern social democracy,” using government to advance a “good society” of economic security, opportunity (at least in the Amartya Sen sense of “capabilities”), and rising living standards for all. It will do this through generous and employment-friendly social policies […]
Severe Deprivation in America: An Introduction
Published: | 6:04 pm | Posted in: Poverty
A Life Crystal Mayberry was born prematurely on a spring day in 1990 shortly after her pregnant mother was stabbed eleven times in the back during a robbery.1 The attack induced labor. Both mother and daughter survived. It was not the first time Crystal’s mother had been stabbed. For as far back as she can […]
Health Spending Growth: Still Facing A Triangle Of Painful Choices
Published: | 1:21 am | Posted in: Health Care Policy and Reform, Neoliberalism
In the four years immediately following the recession (2010 through 2013), health spending grew at a historically low average annual rate of 3.6 percent, about the same as gross domestic product (GDP). This era was interrupted in 2014 with the advent of expanded coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—the newly insured used more care […]