Stanford Project on Income and Inequality

A group of sociologists at Stanford and Harvard (and on from U. Mich) recently finished an impressive and sizable project on inequality in the US called Inequality in the United States: Understanding Inequality with Data (click here for the entire, 89 page report, complete with multiple tables and charts).  They don't just focus on income inequality, but also include debt, education, employment, family, gender, health, immigration, mobility, politics, poverty, race, violent crime and wealth, and they offer many specific analyses within each category (e.g., changes in union membership, or changes in US industry as part of the employment section).  Many of the tables show changes over time so you can get a sense of today's rates compared to those of years before.  Further, you can see at what point in time significant changes in trajectories occurred (click here to see a select number of slides individually). This is really an impressive assembly of data put together into an easily understandable format.  This would be perfect for journalists, researchers, students, and other bloggers who write about these topics.  Some of the data is even broken down by state so you can compare across states (e.g., violent crime) and others allow you to see how the US compares with other countries.  More about the project and other material can be found on the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality website. Here you can test you poverty and inequality IQ and learn the 20 facts about poverty and inequality that everyone should know.

To address these issues through policy, the Center posted a short chapter from a popular book called "Inequality by Design" which uses sociological data to critique the popular Bell Curve viewpoint and explain inequality as a consequence of they way our social institutes are designed and function.  They also offer a short (5-page) report on aspiring for income equality in a 2007 issue of Contexts, which is a publication of the American Sociological Association.

Below I posted their May, 2012 press release (after the break).