People

The World Bank Data Blog post Where the extreme poor live by Marta Schoch, Christoph Lanker and Melina Fleury (10/12/2020) provides the graph copied here. Although the number of poor people has fallen in many regions, most notably East Asia and Pacific, and more recently South Asia, there has been …

At the end of August I posted about the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S in the post How many people are employed in manufacturing? The Census Bureau has a recent post, Manufacturing Still Amon Top Five U.S. Employer by Adam Grundy (10/2/2020) that adds some context. Manufacturing is …

The Census Bureau post Even Short-Term Spells of Poverty Lower School-Aged Children’s Involvement in Extracurricular Activities by Brian Know (9/23/2020) quantifies the challenges of students  due to even temporary spells of poverty. The percentage of children ages 6 to 11 taking lessons was significantly different between those who were in …

The EPI article Racial disparities in income and poverty remain largely unchanged amid strong income growth in 2019 by Valerie Wilson (9/16/2020) reports the data from the Census Bureau on income and poverty in the graph copied here. …real median household income increased 10.6% among Asian households (from $88,774 to …

Elections seem to bring out various statements about manufacturing employment in the U.S. So, here is a review of manufacturing in the U.S. The graph here was created using FRED, which is a great resource for economic data. As a percent of all employees, manufacturing peaked in the early 1940s …

The PEW article Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable by Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz, J. Baxter Oliphant and Elisa Shearer (7/30/2020) answers the question with the graph copied here. As of late last year, 18% of U.S. adults say they turn most …

The article The Racial Wealth Gap is About the Upper Classes by Matt Bruenig (6/29/2020) on the People’s Policy Project explains. First the racial wealth gap is large: If you take the net worth of all white households and divide it by the number of white households, you get $900,600. …

The People’s Policy Project reports on their recent research paper in the post Class and Racial Inequalities in Police Killings (6/23/2020). The full paper, Police Killings in the U.S. is by Justin Feldman, ScD. In general, The highest-poverty areas have a police killing rate of 6.4 per million while the …

Kevin Drum asks a good question in his post How Many Cops Does New York City Need?  First note that violent crime has been dropping since around 1990 (see his graph copied here for examples). In particular for NYC: The per capita number of police officers increased by about 10 …

The chart here comes from using FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data). Since at least the 1970s Hispanic or Latino (using FRED terms) unemployment was consistently between Black or African American and White and more recently slightly closer to White unemployment. For possibly the first time since the 1970s Hispanic or …