As it pushes historic levels, inequality has become a hot topic. Activists have organized around the rich-poor divide, with “The One Percent” and “The 99 Percent” becoming a part of everyday language. The president made inequality a focus of this year’s State of the Union address and called for a new “middle-class economics.” And a French economist, Thomas Piketty, reached the top of the American bestseller list—when did that last happen?—with a dense volume called Capital in the Twenty-First Century that has jump-started a global conversation about the distribution of income and wealth.
Piketty’s detailed research shocked some: As he noted, the United States today is characterized by “a record level of inequality of income from labor (probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world).” But it was not necessarily a big surprise to those of us in California: As with demographics, the Golden State seems to have foreshadowed national trends.
California, for example, is the home to more super rich than anywhere else in the country—and it also exhibits the highest poverty rate in the nation, when cost of living is taken into account. Income disparities in the state of California are among the highest in the nation, outpacing such places as Georgia and Mississippi in terms of the Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality.
[For more of this story, written by Manuel Pastor and Dan Braun, go to http://www.psmag.com/business-...tates-in-the-country]
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