8 thoughts on “Income Inequality Over Time, By State”

  1. Ethnic heterogeneity correlates with income inequality (compare New York and the Dakotas). It doesn’t correlate much with government policies (compare New York and Texas). Neither of these correlations is really news, at least not to students of social history, but they tend to leave those on the left vaguely uncomfortable.

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  2. y81,

    I was thinking of the same thing. Inequality=diversity and diversity=inequality. It’s just that “diversity” is supposed to be a good thing and “inequality” is supposed to be a bad thing, even though semantically, they are really the same thing.

    I was looking at a chart of number of foreign-born US residents recently, and the percentage of foreign-born residents is higher than it’s been in about 90 years.

    http://www.census.gov/how/infographics/foreign_born.html

    In the era of social equality that people like Ezra Klein so admire, we had the lowest percentage of foreign-born population in 100 years. In 1950, it was 6.9%, in 1960 it was 5.4%, in 1970 (the record low for the 20th century) it was 4.7%. Our immigration laws changed right around that point, and our percentage of foreign-born population has been shooting up ever since. As of 2010, 12.9% of our population was foreign-born. Loosely translated from the Russian, if you like sledding, you’d better like hauling the sled up the hill, too. (Lyubish’ katat’sya, lyubi i sanochki vozit’.)

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  4. Top marginal tax rate will not explain changes since 1987. And it definitely does not explain variations between states.

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    1. Well the capital gains rate also went down. (I got tired of trying to figure out trends from a flashing picture and looked at the link below the gif and that’s what Ezra says.) Also, while there is variation between the states, sure looks like a national-wide increase in inequality.

      And immigration seems too broad. New York and California show lots of rising inequality compared to other states and have lots of immigrants, but the deep South is the other area which appears to have the fastest rise and it has as nearly little immigration as North Dakota. Immigration by state figures for 2010 here. And if you want to say race not immigrants, you really can’t explain the big swing in the South as nothing much changed in the racial distribution there during this period.

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      1. Immigration by foreigners, maybe. However, US citizens have been moving South and West in large numbers over the same time period. http://txsdc.utsa.edu/data/decennial/2000/Apportionment/USPopC.aspx

        Click to access c2010br-01.pdf

        http://data.geocomm.com/tiger/

        People tend to move to chase opportunity. The areas which should see the most growth offer employment:
        http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2013/08/the_geography_o_1.html

        and reasonable cost of shelter:
        http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/.

        This draws people from all income levels.

        http://taxfoundation.org/blog/monday-map-migration-personal-income

        Texas, the Research Triangle, the area around Atlanta have been growing for decades.

        Florida seems to draw many retirees, who are living on a fixed income, but may have more property and savings than the average. Some people earn fortunes catering to the newcomers; at a guess, property developers, medical clinics would do well with an influx of retirees.

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  5. “…the deep South is the other area which appears to have the fastest rise and it has as nearly little immigration as North Dakota. Immigration by state figures for 2010 here. And if you want to say race not immigrants, you really can’t explain the big swing in the South as nothing much changed in the racial distribution there during this period.”

    Are you sure that the numbers support that? There has been a much-noted increase in internal migration of black Americans back to the South in the recent past.

    http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-06-30-black-south-census-migration_n.htm

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