Household money supply tightens
Since April 2020, the Census Bureau, in collaboration with several other official statistical agencies. has been conducting a biweekly survey of people’s material well-being called the Household Pulse Survey. It asks questions about employment, income, food availability, mortgage and rent status, health, and the ease of paying bills, among other things. There’s a lot in these surveys, but for now I want to take a look at just a couple things: how hard people are finding it to pay their bills and where the money is coming from. There have been several… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): January 3, 2019 Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough, on the paradox of human rights discourse arising alongside great inequality, and on the difference between poverty reduction and income compression
Fresh audio product, lots of it
Freshly posted to my radio archives. Sorry, don’t know why it took so long. Very often the podcasts are up for subscribers well ahead of the web page update, though. September 13, 2012 Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute on the State of Working America • Melissa Gira Grant, author of this fine piece, on sex workers and their self-appointed saviors September 6, 2012 Christian Parenti talks about the politics of climate change on the occasion of the publication of the paperback version of Tropic of Chaos August 30, 2012 Joel Schalit on a militarized, post-democratic Israel • David Cay Johnston on Romney’s taxes August 23,… Read More
NYC: more unequal than Brazil
The New York City Independent Budget Office is just out with an analysis (pdf )of income distribution in the city. It’s no surprise that it’s very unequal. The surprise is that it’s far more unequal than Brazil’s. Full details are available in the letter—which was in response to a request from City Council member James Oddo—but here are some highlights: The poorest tenth (decile) of the city’s population has an average income of $988, and claim 0.1% of the city’s total income. Since the source of this data is tax returns, the very… Read More
Tough, Shorty
Economics proves that tall people deserve more: Andreas Schick, Richard H. Steckel NBER Working Paper No. 16570 Issued in December 2010 Taller workers receive a substantial wage premium. Studies extending back to the middle of the last century attribute the premium to non-cognitive abilities, which are associated with stature and rewarded in the labor market. More recent research argues that cognitive abilities explain the stature-wage relationship. This paper reconciles the competing views by recognizing that net nutrition, a major determinant of adult height, is integral to our cognitive and non-cognitive development. Using… Read More
Radio commentary, September 10, 2009
Thursday morning brought the release of the annual income, poverty, and health insurance numbers from the Census Bureau for 2008. As you might have guessed, the first year of the recession was pretty bad news for just about everyone. Median household income—the income right at the middle of the income distribution, with half of all households having higher incomes, and half lower—fell by 3.6%, the biggest yearly decline since these figures begin in 1967. All racial and ethnic groups took a hit: non-Hispanic whites were off 2.6%; blacks, off 2.8%; Asians, 4.4%;… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
Posted on September 16, 2010 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, September 15, 2010
[Been a while since I posted one of these. Too many things to do, too little time. Sorry. Much more, including graphs, in the forthcoming LBO.] Thursday morning brought the release of the Census Bureau’s annual income, poverty, and health insurance numbers. These are drawn from a special edition of the Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey. The regular survey, which covers about 60,000 households, is what the monthly unemployment figures, among other things, are based on. This special survey, done every March, covers 100,000 households. This is a very large sample, though… Read More