Based on an analysis of U.S. Census microdata, Harvard University PhD candidate Robert Maduca has found that the nation’s economic inequality surged from 1980 to 2013, deepening its regional economic divides, CityLab’s Richard Florida reports.
Maduca attributes fully half of the growth in spatial inequality over this 23- year period to the economic gains of the 1% wealthiest people in the country, and another quarter to the remaining top 10% of income earners.
Up until now, most researchers have believed America’s rising geographic divides to be a consequence of the way people sort themselves by education, occupation, and income...Manduca does not deny that these kinds of geographic sorting forces are in play. Instead, he finds that the staggering growth in the economic divide helps to magnify such spatial division. The rich and the poor occupy different places to begin with, so as income inequality rises, the geographic discrepancies also rise as a consequence, with rich places getting richer and poor places falling further behind.
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