This figure demonstrates the shift from an economy dominated by manufacturing, to one dominated by information and services. As I understand it, it is this shift that is driving the shrinking of the middle class.
Image borrowed from http://www.whosyourcity.com/.
This is an ad for Allstate’s retirement programs; it appeared on the back cover page of The New Yorker. What struck me is that the ad is using the fact that women leave the workforce to care for children as a tactic to scare families into buying their product:
The average woman spends 11 years out of the workforce taking care of family. Leaving her without enough retirement money to take care of herself. Those 11 years are spent doing important work, caring for children or elderly parents. But then can also hurt her ability to retire. Fact is, women are still earning less than men do, and they live longer…Women care for America. It’s time we showed that America cares about their future.
Notice the picture: it’s a woman with a small child and a stroller, all about to fall off into the large crevice in the $20 bill.
I’m really not sure quite what to make of this or what my take on it is.
The graph below shows the different results when using two different measures of joblessness (notice how the use of two different scales on these graphs–10% and 15%–visually interrupts a fair comparison). Visit the New York Times story that accompanied this image for a historically-grounded discussion of the problematics and politics of measuring joblessness.
These data come from the Luxembourg Income Study, the most rigorous data source for cross-national income and wealth. The chart’s income gap indicator in each country is the disposable (after tax) annual income of the top 10% divided by the disposable income of the bottom 10%. In other words, the income gap is the ratio of the 10% of persons with the highest income to the 10% with the lowest. For instance, in the USA the income of the top-earning 10% was 5.5 times that of the bottom 10%.
The statistics in this chart can be found on page 4 of a document on the Contexts website: http://www.contextsmagazine.org/resources_vol6-3.php That document is a supplement to an article by Peter Dreier, “The United States in Comparative Perspective,” in the Summer 2007 issue of Contexts.
Some may read these statistics and say “inequality in the US is overblown” because the bottom 10% live better off than most people in the rest of the world. That is true if Americans are compared to countries where the average income is less than a dollar a day. But if the American poor are compared to the poor in other wealthy countries, American poor are far worse off.
One of my favorite questions to ask in (especially) Introduction to Sociology classes is: In an ideal world, for what reason does the U.S. government exist? That is, what is a state for? For protection from other states? To protect private property? To maximize happiness? To pool and then redistribute resources for the collective good? It’s something most of them have never thought about. After a discussion, I show them this:
This is where our federal tax dollars go. Students are horrified by the military spending, but completely stumped by the interest on the debt. Most of them have no idea that our debt has any consequences at all.
The pie chart is from http://www.nationalpriorities.org/. You can go every year and update your chart here.
