How Inequality Hurts

This category contains 105 posts

A Flying Public Finally Erupts

America’s top airline execs have every incentive to treat average passengers as cattle and chattel. Could United’s now infamous aisle drag upset their gravy train?

Has America Become Too Generous?

The Trump White House is framing foreign aid as a devastating drain on America’s treasure. But foreign aid isn’t killing the American dream. Inequality is.

America’s Construction Carnage

With America’s union presence declining, construction workers are dying at alarming rates.

Small May Not Always Be Beautiful

The trendy surge in tiny housing offers the rich a chance to become even richer, at everyone else’s expense. A look at the squeezed world of micro housing.

An Anthropology of the Luxury Life?

Social scientists are starting to place the lives of the wealthy under the same microscope formerly trained on primitive tribes in Borneo. Could their research ever explain phenomena like the Donald?

An Inequality Double-Whammy

From new research on the Great Recession, still more evidence that maldistributions of income and wealth really matter

Yellow Canaries and Middle-Aged White Men

Startling new data from the National Academy of Sciences suggest that extreme inequality may be exacting a much steeper price — on our health — than we’ve up to now expected.

How Inequality Corrupts Success

In any society where great stashes of wealth amass at the top, philosopher Elizabeth Anderson reminds us, the wealthy will sooner or later see most of the rest of us as failures.

Getting Beyond Shop-Til-We-Drop

Inequality has our planet down, sociologist Juliet Schor believes, but not out. She’s seeing more of us working for alternatives to mindless consumerism — and the failing system that so relentlessly generates it.

Our ‘Stealth Politics’ of Inequality

Average Americans today have essentially zilch influence on public policy. You don’t need to trust your gut on that. Northwestern University political scientist Benjamin Page has the data.