In 2016, the overall SPM rate was 13.9 percent. This was 0.6 percentage points lower than the 2015 SPM rate of 14.5 (Figure 1 and Figure 2).

SPM rates were down for children under age 18 and adults aged 18 to 64. SPM rates for individuals aged 65 and older were up, from 13.7 percent in 2015 to 14.5 percent in 2016 (Figure 1 and Figure 2).

The SPM rate for 2016 was 1.2 percentage points higher than the official poverty rate of 12.7 percent (Figure 3).

At the beginning of the Great Recession, household spending on education across the income distribution was highly unequal. We examined how different income groups altered their spending on education for children under 18 during this economic crisis. As national and local economic conditions deteriorated during the recession, the difference in odds that a high-income household spent on education relative to a low-income family increased by 20 percent, and the difference in the amounts that high-income families spent on education relative to low-income families also increased by 20 percent.

Why should we care about wealth? It serves an insurance function by protecting against economic shocks, health and personal crises, and mishaps. It brings access to quality health care, educational opportunities, better-resourced communities, and other services. It shapes family economic mobility. It provides retirement security and a springboard for future generations’ investments in human capital and resources. And finally, social and political influence, as well as personal identity, are attached to wealth. It thus matters whether opportunities to amass wealth are equally available.

Racial and ethnic minorities experience higher-than-average rates of illness, have higher age-specific death rates throughout the life course, and are more likely to suffer from early onset of illnesses and more severe diseases than whites. In this article, I examine these and other differences in health outcomes for whites and blacks in the United States and show that black-white health disparities are large and appear to widen over the life cycle.

Between 1990 and 2015, average academic performance improved for students of all racial and ethnic groups, but grew fastest among black and Hispanic students.