(via ColorLines):
Showing posts with label Inequality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Inequality. Show all posts
Friday, November 26, 2010
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Latoya on feminism and the wealth gap
Latoya Peterson (usually of Racialicious) makes a compelling case for why feminists should be talking more about the wealth gap, and maybe less about the pay gap.
She cites recent statistics from the economic development organization Insight that indicate women of color in particular enter adulthood with zero wealth, while almost all other demographics come into the job market in the positive. Here is the core of the (pretty shocking) statistics:
Wage equity is still a large problem for women—while the gender wage gap is widest for white women compared to white men, black, Latina, and Native American women take home far less than their white counterparts. But earnings are only a small part of overall financial stability. What matters more than income in the long run is the accumulation of wealth. As lead researcher Mariko Chang explains in her presentation summarizing the data, “wealth confers benefits income doesn’t.” While income is vital for day to day survival, only wealth can generate further income, provide collateral for loans, be passed from generation to generation through inheritance, and provide the individual with the means to survive without a paycheck. Sadly, for many of women of color, the wealth gap is even wider than the income gap. Most women of color have no assets except for their cars—once the blue book value of the vehicle is removed from the calculation of median wealth, black women are left with a scant $100 in assets, while Latinas can only claim $120.While income disparities are important factors in determining quality of life, wealth disparities can have devastating long-term effects, prohibiting the accumulation of retirement funds, extended unpaid job leave in personal crises, and investment, like in property or in other long-term assets. And we are talking about MAJOR gulfs between demographics here, economic gulfs that get lost when we stay on the terrain of wage gaps.
Read the whole thing.
Friday, August 14, 2009
US Income Inequality: The Gap Grows
From Tim Fernholz at Tapped:
As you can see, nearly a quarter of total income goes to the top 1 percent of Americans, nearly as high as the most recent peak, in 1928. (Notice any correlation of events?).Recessions (depressions?) seem to hurt some people more than others...
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
WaPo makes shocking discovery: Being poor costs money and time!
Poor? Pay up. Having Little Money Often Means No Car, No Washing Machine, No Checking Account And No Break From Fees and High Prices.
It seems like this fact should be common knowledge, but it isn't, apparently, or it wouldn't be in the Washington Post. Until it is common knowledge, I have no problem with articles like this being in major national newspapers.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Some good news about the economy
Via the NY Times.
That's some comforting news, for those of us who were panicked about the dipping salaries of Wall Street billionaires.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Nationalizing the internets: Bandwidth Access As Fundamental Right?
I spend a lot of time on the internet, but not nearly as much as I spent online in college. I may have had more free time at the time, but additionally, the internet was a key to my education and I had to spend a lot of time using it to succeed. Not only does it put information and the search for information at your finger tips, it also forces the knowledge-seeking user to develop the skill of discerning credible sources from discredited ones, and weighing good arguments against bad ones.
Nowadays I have less time to play around on the internet (surprising as that may be coming from a blogger) but I spend my days thinking about the internet at my day job...at an internet service provider. Given my belief that the internet is an absolute key to education and therefore a tool which when distributed unequally will lead to social inequality, working for a competing internet service provider (as opposed to what's known as an incumbent provider, the corporate giants like Comcast, Qwest, and AT&T) has stimulated a lot of thought about what internet access (and lack of access) means in today's world.
Aside from the value as an educational tool, there is the value bandwidth brings as a communications asset. Sure, there are other ways to contact people aside from email and Skype , but if the current disparity in bandwidth access continues, certain places and the knowledge of certain people will be out of reach to certain people. This is a serious problem. It's a quality of life issue. It's an inequality issue. It's an education issue. Which makes it over-all, an economic issue.
A couple months ago, The Times had an op-ed on the very subject of bandwidth inaccessibility in the United States, which overwhelmingly hurts those living in rural areas. Author Tim Wu compares broadband scarcity to oil scarcity, and big oil to big telecoms:
Wu also mentions that some cities across the U.S. and in Europe have built their own fiber optic networks which allow for more bandwidth transport and make bandwidth accessible in areas and to customers that big ISPs might not consider profitable. Though as someone working for a company trying to utilize a municipally owned and operated fiber network (allowing bandwidth to be sold to residents of the city just like electricity, water, and other utilities), I can say this path is not an easy one without any meaningful federal support or public dialogue about the importance of supporting publicly owned telecommunications access.Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.
Wired connections to the home — cable and telephone lines — are the major way that Americans move information. In the United States and in most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their investments — similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee high prices.
Like electrical wires and plumbing, bandwidth infrastructure should be a priority and a standard by which we judge all "developed" nations as advanced or backward, because this has such a heavy impact on the people of any nation. Worldwide bandwidth inequality is clearly even more pressing than that of the United States, where a presumed majority of people can access the internet in public libraries if not their own homes.
Too often it seems today's American leftists hesitate to label anything other than basic human necessities as fundamental rights which must be distributed evenly across populations. And to be clear, I say all this knowing that internet access is not a necessary physical life-or-death resource.
But I am of the school of thought that humans deserve more than just the right to not die. As we move into an "information economy" bandwidth access really does become access to the means of production.
Sure, if we're making a list of priorities, I'm not putting bandwidth above food or water or shelter. But I do think we're at a point where it's fair to start including bandwidth in our list of resources which should not be controlled and made scarce by profit-seeking corporations, but should instead be in the interest of the people to control, produce, and distribute evenly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
