than liberal homeowners.[24] Perhaps we are not so polarized after all. Maybe above a certain income level, we are all segregationists.

We could provide every child with a fairer shot at security and success. We could make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair. Crime rates would plummet. Eviction rates, too. Neighborhoods would stabilize and come alive. Schools could focus more on education instead of dedicati

doubled. For several decades after World War II, ordinary workers’ inflation-adjusted wages (known as “real wages”) increased by 2 percent each year. But since 1979, real wages have grown by only 0.3 percent a year.[21] Astonishingly, the real wages for many Americans today are roughly what they were forty years ago. Ninety percent of Americans who

It’s more socially acceptable today to disclose a mental illness than to tell someone you’re broke. When politicians propose antipoverty legislation, they say it will help “the middle class.”

Poor renters in the future will pay for this, as will the Democratic Party, incessantly blamed for having a “messaging problem” when perhaps the matter is that liberals have a despondency problem: fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair.

I’ve been forced to face the fact that poverty has refused to decline significantly in the years since the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Housing Choice Voucher Program were rolled out and expanded. These policies are at once solutions to poverty and stanchions of it. They rescue millions of families from a social ill, but they do nothing to addr

Don’t we benefit when we see our savings go up and up, even when those returns require a kind of human sacrifice?[39] Consumers benefit from worker exploitation, too. We can now, with a few clicks, summon rides and groceries and Chinese takeout and a handyman, all at cut rates.

Wealth traps breed poverty traps.[5] The concentration of affluence breeds more affluence, and the concentration of poverty, more poverty.

Honest work delivered a solid paycheck, and a big reason why had to do with union power. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, nearly a third of all U.S. workers carried union cards. These were the days of the United Automobile Workers, led by Walter Reuther, once savagely beaten by Ford’s brass knuckle boys, and of the mighty American Federation of Labo