A majority of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday saw the justification offered by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census for exactly what it was: a lie, though the court was more delicate in its terminology. Ross has said repeatedly that government needs to ask […]
A report from the California Business Roundtable says the state’s working poor are finding it harder than ever to move up the economic ladder toward the middle class. The roundtable’s president, Robert Lapsley, says the cost of living is the biggest barrier to upward mobility in the state. Lapsley says that’s in addition to cumbersome and confusing […]
Between 2000 and 2015, as housing prices rose, historically Black cities and neighborhoods across the region lost thousands of low-income Black households. These areas include the Bayview in San Francisco, flatland neighborhoods in Oakland and Berkeley, and the cities of East Palo Alto, Richmond, and Vallejo. Low-income Asian and Latinx households decreased in several neighborhoods […]
As California has rebounded from the Great Recession, the Imperial Valley has largely defied attempts to expand its economy beyond seasonal farming and government work, and the county continues to suffer the highest unemployment rates in the state. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest five-year estimate, Imperial County’s unemployment rate stands at 16% — […]
California again had more outs than ins via major moving companies last year, but that gap shrank 21 percent as departures fell faster than arrivals. My trusty spreadsheet — filled with annual state-by-state migration stats from United, Allied and Atlas van lines — shows a continuation of the long-running decline in people moving, in or […]
California is violating the rights of poor defendants by attaching fees to misdemeanor criminal convictions regardless of their ability to pay, a state appeals court ruled Tuesday. The ruling by the Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles singled out payments imposed by state law to help fund court operations and maintain a statewide […]
If you spent 2018 mainlining misery about global warming, inequality, toxic politics or other anxieties, I’m here to break your addiction with some good news: The world got better last year, and it is going to get even better this year. Poverty around the world is plummeting; half the world is now middle class; and […]
The U.S. Census Bureau and the state Department of Finance issue annual population estimates each December and they don’t always agree on how many human beings occupy California. During the previous decade, following the 2000 census, their estimates were as much as one million persons apart – largely because of different calculations of state-to-state migration. […]
For older Americans, the last few years of work can be a vital chance to patch up thin savings or pay down debt to ease their way into retirement. Many aren’t getting that opportunity. . . . Even though the official unemployment rate is just 3% for older workers, the actual jobs environment is surprisingly […]
Where are people thinking of moving to and from? An analysis of searches on real estate sites is the easiest way to find out. So that’s what Redfin did. The company recently examined searches of homes for sale by more than a million Redfin users in 90 metropolitan areas between July and September of 2018, […]
New York again lost the most domestic migrants, at 180,000, down from last year’s peak for the decade of 193,000. California’s net domestic out-migration continued to intensify, with a loss of 156,000, which has steadily risen from 41,000 in 2011. Illinois, where the housing is considerably more affordable than California, but lacks the economy of […]
The vast majority of Americans consider themselves “middle class.” No one can quite agree, though, on what that means. Richard Reeves, along with colleagues at the Brookings Institution, has cataloged no fewer than a dozen economic formulas that seek to define this elastic cohort largely by what people earn each year: household income between X […]
This brief discusses in depth the methodological issues of measuring income inequality in the US as discussed by Rose (2018). The primary issues concern different studies’ definitions of income, datasets, units of analysis, income measures (market incomes only; total cash income with government transfers; and posttax, posttransfer income), income adjustments for household size, and the […]
Piketty and Saez (2003) found that income inequality rose substantially between 1979 and 2002 because the top 10 percent of the income distribution took 91 percent of the income growth during that period. As the real incomes of the top 10 percent soared, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent stagnated. Piketty and Saez’s findings […]
A few weeks back, I wrote about a new study from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It convinced me that, although typical incomes are rising slowly, they are still rising and that, over long periods, the increases are significant. To cite one statistic from that column: Average inflation-adjusted household incomes for the middle fifth of […]