Hunter Depalma
ECON 221
Butler
February 13, 2015
Racism & Income Disparity: Income Effect Income disparity is an ongoing complication within the United States not only between men and women, but between races. Many people in our country are poor, and the improvement in their lives that the ending of income inequality can bring them is great. For the most part this shifts demand curves from the incomes increasing and decreasing, negatively and positively. Some argue that our society here in America is set up to where the lower working class cannot escape poverty. We have provisions and burdens in our economy that will keep regressing the lower class. There is growing recognition that we need an inclusive economy that works for eve-ryone—not …show more content…
From the data shown before, Mississippi has a greater gap in unemployment and average medium income as compared to the state of Maryland. Mississippi also has a more prevalent problem of segregation and racism as where Maryland does not. We can assume that because racism in engrained in Mississippi’s founding provisions that it is harder to get rid of, since the state is engulfed with lingering segre-gation from family history and culture. Maryland on the other hand has a mild history of racism, but was more adequate to change and transition to more equal laws for African Americans and Whites. There could be a hypothesis that states who were more susceptible to cultural change have a less marginal gap between incomes. Though racial discrimination has been a prominent obstacle in our country as a whole, we can look to states like Maryland for hope. Maryland still has a large gap differentiating the incomes of African Americans and Whites, but it has been de-creasing within the last 10 years from the data given above. We could also make the conclusion that education has a powerful stake in income inequality and poverty within America. Looking at the percentage of individuals that have obtained a Bachelors degree or higher in the state of Mis-sissippi, we can see that races with low education automatically have a higher percentage of pov-erty. For example, 14% of African American women obtained a Bachelors degree in the state of Mississippi and had a poverty rate of 38% while 22% of White females obtained a bachelors de-gree and only had a poverty rate of 14% (Hill). The lower earnings of African-Americans, which are to an extent explained by lower educational attainment, mean higher poverty rates (Hill). Higher poverty rates mean less employed African Americans which cannot be counted into the working class. A widening gap within our incomes could be due to lack of African Americans working, making the number
ECON 221
Butler
February 13, 2015
Racism & Income Disparity: Income Effect Income disparity is an ongoing complication within the United States not only between men and women, but between races. Many people in our country are poor, and the improvement in their lives that the ending of income inequality can bring them is great. For the most part this shifts demand curves from the incomes increasing and decreasing, negatively and positively. Some argue that our society here in America is set up to where the lower working class cannot escape poverty. We have provisions and burdens in our economy that will keep regressing the lower class. There is growing recognition that we need an inclusive economy that works for eve-ryone—not …show more content…
From the data shown before, Mississippi has a greater gap in unemployment and average medium income as compared to the state of Maryland. Mississippi also has a more prevalent problem of segregation and racism as where Maryland does not. We can assume that because racism in engrained in Mississippi’s founding provisions that it is harder to get rid of, since the state is engulfed with lingering segre-gation from family history and culture. Maryland on the other hand has a mild history of racism, but was more adequate to change and transition to more equal laws for African Americans and Whites. There could be a hypothesis that states who were more susceptible to cultural change have a less marginal gap between incomes. Though racial discrimination has been a prominent obstacle in our country as a whole, we can look to states like Maryland for hope. Maryland still has a large gap differentiating the incomes of African Americans and Whites, but it has been de-creasing within the last 10 years from the data given above. We could also make the conclusion that education has a powerful stake in income inequality and poverty within America. Looking at the percentage of individuals that have obtained a Bachelors degree or higher in the state of Mis-sissippi, we can see that races with low education automatically have a higher percentage of pov-erty. For example, 14% of African American women obtained a Bachelors degree in the state of Mississippi and had a poverty rate of 38% while 22% of White females obtained a bachelors de-gree and only had a poverty rate of 14% (Hill). The lower earnings of African-Americans, which are to an extent explained by lower educational attainment, mean higher poverty rates (Hill). Higher poverty rates mean less employed African Americans which cannot be counted into the working class. A widening gap within our incomes could be due to lack of African Americans working, making the number