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In general, more affordable housing correlates with lower income inequality.
But for labor groups, there is no debate: Nafta hurt American jobs and household earnings.
Social networks, professional networks, offices, and schools help keep high earners in place.
Maybe kindness is not a distraction from or orthogonal to change. Maybe it is a pathway to it.
Members of Congress - with or without inside information - simply should not be allowed to trade stocks.
Aided by the Great Society and the New Deal, the middle class grew, everywhere from Winnetka to Orlando to Humboldt.
No country save for India is expected to bear a heavier financial burden from climate change than the United States.
Taxes do have a clear record of curbing the consumption of, and thus the public-health impact of, tobacco and alcohol.
Domestic dogs thrive in the backyard and at the foot of the bed. Wolves thrive on the hunt in the country's wildlands.
The government is more responsive to wealthy communities than poor communities, and to wealthy people than poor people.
Long before 2020, many Americans were in the position of patching their own safety net and acting as their own city hall.
The world is falling apart and nobody is there for you, 2020 has shown it over and over again. But American capitalism is.
The workforce is getting Uberized. The gig economy is taking over the world. Independent-contractor jobs are the new normal.
The United States came into the coronavirus recession with a few structural advantages, including a highly diversified economy.
The bunker business is just one instantiation, the grandest instantiation, of what you might think of as conspiracy capitalism.
Deficits are anathema to most Republicans. And Democrats widely believe that government spending should fall as the economy recovers.
The gig economy isn't taking over, but it has become a useful emblem of what it is like to work for a living in late-stage capitalism.
The pandemic has proved true over and over again what was already well known: that income and wealth are protective when it comes to health.
Moderately priced homes might draw working families in a metro area. And having rising incomes at the top might price lower-income families out.
Cows and other livestock account for roughly one-sixth of all greenhouse-gas emissions, and as a general point, eating meat means taxing the Earth.
The country should not have to wonder whether politicians' stock trades were corrupt. It should not have to think about politicians' portfolios at all.
The world needs to slash emissions by tens of billions of tons annually, which categorically requires government investment and government regulations.
Economic anxiety might not have won Donald Trump the White House, but much of his strongest support came from more sclerotic rural and industrial areas.
Police forces across America need root-to-stem changes - to their internal cultures, training and hiring practices, insurance, and governing regulations.
Depriving immigrant families of health care, healthy food, insurance, and antipoverty supports does not just hurt them. In the long term, it hurts everyone.
Wolves want to be wolves. Servals want to be servals. Bears want to be bears. And it is impossible to be a wolf or a serval or a bear when living in a cage.
Your wealth is the value of your assets - your retirement accounts, your home, the unsold stocks - minus your debts, like your credit-card bill and your mortgage.
Recessions are never good for anyone. A sputtering economy means miserable financial, emotional, and physical-health consequences for everyone from infants to retirees.
In some ways, modern life has made us unkind. That unkindness has profound personal effects. And if we can build a kinder society, that would make life better for everyone.
Americans have become more atomized by education, income, and political leanings. That polarization has meant sharply increased antipathy toward people with different beliefs.
Millennials are worth less on paper than members of older generations are, and are worth less on paper than members of older generations were at the same point in their lives.
Many women are the lower-earning partner in a married couple, thanks in part to forces that relegate women to less remunerative professions and pay them less for the same work.
At a personal level, there's ample evidence that being aware of your emotions and generous to yourself improves your physical and mental health, as well as your relationships with others.
Arguably, it might prompt consumers to think about their consumption, with paper straws and reusable grocery bags and shared urban bicycles acting as a gateway to more meaningful changes.
Where Democrats have a real toehold to criticize Republicans is that families still feel very financially fragile. About 2 in 5 adults would struggle to come up with $400 in an emergency.
A warming planet is destroying the country's physical infrastructure: In 2019 alone, the United States experienced more than a dozen billion-dollar weather events, and 2020 might be worse.
Income is now more concentrated in the hands of the rich. Those well-off households tend to save and invest higher proportions of their earnings than middle-class or low-income families do.
The United States is an outlier in the size and scope of its loan infrastructure; in many peer countries, higher education is seen as a public good and a college degree is low-cost or free.
As smoking has disappeared from television screens, planes, bars and restaurants, and other public spaces, the smoking rate has dropped to a third of its peak of 45 percent in the mid-1950s.
Climate change is killing Americans. Wildfires, heat waves, mudslides, hurricanes, and floods lead to hundreds if not thousands of deaths every year. But those are only the direct fatalities.
Along with the rise of inequality, the slowdown in productivity growth, and the shrinking of the middle class, the spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life.
Black women are three times as likely to die giving birth or shortly after birth as white women. Black women in the United States die having a child at roughly the same rate as women in Mongolia.
The U.S. has fewer, stingier, more complicated, and more conditional safety nets available to people than many other advanced economies - less generous 'automatic stabilizers,' in economic parlance.
Fighting recessions and building public infrastructure, including care, health, and educational infrastructure - this should not be the work of citizens. When it is, let's acknowledge that's a tragedy.
Urbanization, falling poverty rates, and growing global trade have changed the diets and expanded the waistlines of the world's poor, with processed food and sweetened drinks becoming household staples.
Student loans are delaying retirements. They're suppressing the housing market. They're suffocating new business formation. They're even leading young people to delay getting married and having children.
An explosion of meat-replacement products has followed the path set by almond milk in the past few years, not just tempeh- or seitan- or soy-based products that taste nothing like meat, but meat simulacra.
Older people still see socialism and communism as dangerous, authoritarian political systems, whereas younger people are more likely to see them as economic systems, and to care far less one way or another.
Plastic straws might be everything terrible about American consumerism, individually wrapped. But paper straws put the lie to the belief that we can consume our way out of the problems created by consumerism.
The United States needs a much more progressive tax-and-transfer infrastructure, given how dramatically inequality has increased. But not every single policy needs to be ideally progressive to achieve that goal.