What Lies Behind America's Rising Inequality

Wage inequality does not tell the whole picture of the growing income inequality in the United States, writes Richard Florida, who examines the myriad other factors that may be driving this trend.

March 8, 2012, 9am PST | Jonathan Nettler | @nettsj

In a companion piece to an article we posted earlier this week, Florida looks at shifts in populations, declining rates of unionization, and the intersection of race, poverty and economic disadvantage for their role in explaining, "the inequality puzzle across America's cities."

According to Florida, the results of this inquiry, conducted with the assistance of Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) colleague Charlotta Mellander, "suggest that full story of inequality across American cities goes beyond technology, globalization, skills and wages, and includes unions, race and poverty."

Florida sees the strongest correlation between income inequality and poverty, leading him to conclude that, "[w]e need to create more good jobs, and to develop strategies to turn the tens of millions of current low-wage, low-skill jobs into higher-wage jobs by more fully engaging worker sand leveraging their skills. But we must also build a more robust social safety net to address the persistent legacies of poverty and race which plague the truly disadvantaged."

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The Inequality Puzzle in U.S. Cities

Published on Wednesday, March 7, 2012 in The Atlantic Cities