Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Segregated America

The bottom 40% of the USA's population has only 0.3% of the wealth, and the top 20% of Americans has 84%.

More Americans are segregated by income today, than they were 30 years ago. That's according to a new Pew Research Center study looking at U.S. neighborhoods. Income inequality in the United States has increasingly led to a larger number of people gravitating to neighborhoods. residential segregation by income increased during the past three decades across the United States and in 27 of the nation’s 30 largest major metropolitan areas.

Stephen Klineberg, a sociology professor at Rice University and the co-director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research explains "...people increasingly live in very separate worlds...  it's much easier in cities like Houston and San Antonio and Dallas to live in those gated communities, those master planned communities that bring people together all of the same socio-economic status...we have suddenly become part - not of a national economy, but of a global economy. Companies can produce goods anywhere, sell them everywhere. If you are doing a job that I can train a third world worker to do and I pay that third world worker $10 a day to do that job, I'm not going to pay you $10 an hour...The great danger for the future of America is not an ethnic divide. It's a class divide."
However, the findings reflect not only an increased level of segregation by income, but also by race. "Despite the long-term rise in residential segregation by income,” the report states, “it remains less pervasive than residential segregation by race, even though black-white segregation has been falling for several decades.”


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