Study finds gap between rich and poor growing regionally too
There’s an old saying about a rising tide lifting all boats — and for more than a century, as the gap between the richest and poorest parts of the U.S. shrank, it seemed as though, in America at least, it might be true. In recent decades, however, the tide has turned. Over the past 40 years, the gap between rich and poor communities has increased dramatically, and Robert Manduca believes a large measure of the change can be chalked up to rising income inequality. A Ph.D. student in the Sociology and Social Policy degree program in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Manduca is the author of a study that shows that in recent decades, the number of people living in communities at the extreme ends of the income scale has increased threefold, and more than half of the change is due to increases in income inequality at the national level. The...