Click on the above link to see how one's county of residence compares to other nearby areas in contributing to the social mobility of children. This interactive along with the New York Times article, An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths Out of Poverty, describes how much growing up in the nation's largest cities affects future earnings based on a recent study by Chetty and Hendren. A somewhat similar interactive, showing the changing geographical distribution of income concenration (1970-2007) over the nation's 24 largest cities is available through The Stanford Center for the Study of Wealth and Poverty.
Explore this rich-media digital story about vertical building and living created by The National Film Board of Canada and The New York Times. The full interactive collectionincludes videos, graphics, games, and articles that allow users to understand the nature, history, and impact of such structures on their developers, occupants, and larger society. Several videos Include insights about the relevance of social stratification.
The New York Times recently provided an excellent visualization of the distribution of officially-defined poverty in the U.S. The interactive map allows users to drill down to county and census tract levels to find absolute and relative numbers of poor in area. It was developed with software via Social Explorer.
See additional NYT stories, videos, and interactives related to social stratification and inequality, such as Class Matters and Location Matters.
The Economic Policy Institute recently created an interactive graphic, inequality.is., that describes the extent of income inequality in the U.S., how it got so unequal, and offers tangible suggestions about what ordinary people can do to diminish it. The interactive also allows users to estimate the amount of actual income inequality and place their own earnings in the context of demographically similar populations. Animated videos narrated by former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, describe why such inequality has increased in recent decades.
Today's NY Times mentions a provocative new study by a team of economists from Harvard on the correlation between place of residence and intergenerational income mobility. The study suggests substantial variability across the U.S. in the likelihood of rising substantially in income. Among notable findings is that mobility among those in the South and Midwest appears to be generally lower than for those living elsewhere. The Times piece also includes some great interactive graphics.
Visualize the world's 100 richest people via this new interactive graphic available at Bloomberg.com, allowing drill-down to wealth estimate, place, industry, source (self-made/inherited), age, and sex. Graphic is a useful complement to annual World's Richest compilations provided by Forbes (latest edition includes a "25th anniversary" timeline, encouraging users to reflect on the changing fortunes of world's wealthiest over past quarter century). See also latest edition of Forbes 400, The Richest People in America.
Veterans' Day is a most appropriate time to reflect on the relation between social class and military service. In particular need of reflection is the fact that those from the lower reaches of the stratification order typically bear the brunt of casualties during war. Poor and working-class men are more often killed because they are more likely to serve in harm's way as non-commissioned front-line soldiers, but they also have been less able to avoid conscription by either paying another to serve as in the Civil War or receiving college deferment as in the Vietnam War (see MacLean, 2012). Today's military is exclusively comprised of volunteers who often join because they lack viable employment alternatives, and this has only heightened the class-biased composition of casualties from recent wars in the Middle East. Moreover, poor and working-class men are also more likely to feel the continuing effects of war in terms of psychiatric distress as they transition out of the service and try to adapt to civilian life.
Army and Marine suicide rates increased sharply between 2001-2020 and today are about twice that for the U.S. population (US Dept of Veterans Affairs 2022) . During the heigth of war in the Middle East, more active-duty military personnel took their lives than died on the battlefield (Williams, 2012). However, suicide among veterans is of even far greater magnitude. According to Veterans Affairs, although about 1 percent of adults served in the military over the past decade, veterans represented 20 percent of all U.S. suicides. As discussed in the above Democracy Now! interviews with Aaron Glantz and others knowledgeable about the issue, the extreme suicide problem among military personnel and veterans reflects several key factors, including multiple deployments to the Middle East and an inadequate government treatment response to depression and PTSD.
For an excellent description of how war produces mental disorders and other adjustment problems, view the PBS Frontline documentary, The Wounded Platoon, which follows soldiers in an Army infantry unit from Fort Riley to deployment in Iraq and then back to the U.S.
NPR has published a handy interactive map of the U.S., providing recent data relevant to household income, unemployment, and housing foreclosures. Data, color-coded per county, allow for easy visual comparisons between states and regions. Users may drill down to obtain precise county level figures.
This interactive graphic developed by David McCandless suggests alternative answers to the question of who or what is in charge of major world-influencing decisions. While McCandless gives his take on the hierarchy of actor-power on the world stage, his graphic will no doubt provoke discussion--conspiratorial explanations and otherwise.
"The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement." (my emphasis) Appelbaum and Gebeloff, from "Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It" New York Times, February 11, 2012
This article, video, and related interactive graphic examine the growing reliance on federal programs among those Americans who may not consider themselves to be poor. Residents of a Minnesota town were interviewed by Appelbaum and Gebeloff to explore the contradiction between asserting that government assistance is wrong, while simultaneously receiving it. A related NY Timesstory by Kopicki, examining data from a poll conducted in December, 2011, notes most Americans say they expect to pay more in taxes than they will ever receive back in terms of personal benefits. Younger adults were particularly apt to report that Social Security and Medicare would not be around when they came of age to draw on them (see related poll graphics).
