Poverty

In the United States, 21.9 percent of all children are in poverty, a poverty rate second only to that of Mexico’s (among rich nations).

Racial Discrimination

Racial discrimination continues to be in the labor market. An experiment carried out in Chicago and Boston during 2001 and 2002 shows that resumes with “white-sounding” names, whether male or female, were much more likely to result in call backs for interviews than were those with “black-sounding” names (even though the resumes were otherwise identical).

Racial Gaps in Education

High-school dropout rates are least among whites and highest among Hispanics, while college enrollment rates are least among blacks and highest among whites. The high-school dropout rate has grown more similar among these three groups, while the college enrollment rate has grown more sharply different.

Occupational Sex Segregation

Women and men tend to work in very different occupations. And overall “men’s jobs” are better paid than “women’s jobs.”

Gender Pay Gaps

Throughout much of the 20th century, the average woman earned about 60% of what the average man earned. Starting in the late 1970s, there was a substantial increase in women’s relative earnings, with women coming to earn about 80% of what men earned. This historic rise plateaued in 2005 and, since then, the pay gap has remained roughly unchanged.

Education Wage Premium

Only college graduates have experienced growth in median weekly earnings since 1979 (in real terms). High school dropouts have, by contrast, seen their real median weekly earnings decline by about 22 percent.

Wealth Inequality

The ownership of wealth among households in the U.S. became somewhat more concentrated in the 1980s and 1990s. The top 10% of households controlled 68.3 percent of the total wealth in 1983 and 71.5% of the total wealth in 2001.

CEO pay

The ratio of the average pay of the 100 highest-paid CEOs in the United States to the average wage of workers increased from 39:1 in 1970 to 191:1 in 1988 to 1,039:1 in 2000. Put more colloquially, top CEOs in 1970 made 39 times more than the average worker, whereas now they make 1,039 times more than the average worker.

Wage Inequality

Over the last 30 years, wage inequality in the United States has increased substantially, with overall levels of inequality closing in on unprecedented levels. This overall trend is complicated, however, by somewhat different patterns of change at the top and bottom of the wage distribution.