With income inequality a front-burner issue, nearly 200 scholars, venture capitalists, and leaders of socially focused nonprofits gathered at Stanford Graduate School of Business in mid-October to examine strategies aimed at benefiting the poorest 50% of the population. The Innovation for Shared Prosperity Conference focused on innovative financial, social, and research models that can improve
With income inequality a front-burner issue, nearly 200 scholars, venture capitalists, and leaders of socially focused nonprofits gathered at Stanford Graduate School of Business in mid-October to examine strategies aimed at benefiting the poorest 50% of the population. The Innovation for Shared Prosperity Conference focused on innovative financial, social, and research models that can improve
Jimmy Wilson, a 49-year-old cook who works at a Detroit bar, is sitting outside on his break and fuming. “This doesn’t affect me at all,” he says, speaking about the Democratic debates streaming on the bar’s TVs. “I still have to go to work in the morning. I still have to pay taxes.” Wilson’s Corktown
Here's an interesting hypothetical. If you were asked to predict the magnitude of the racial wealth gap in 1963 versus 2016, what would you say? Has it improved, stayed the same, or gotten worse? This was the focus of a new article appearing in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Specifically, a team of researchers led by Michael
The Gender Paradox As presented at the 2019 Business Fights Poverty 2019 by: Dr. Laurel Steinfield, Bentley University, DPhil, University of Oxford Please click on the link below to view the slides. Laurel Steinfield Oxford presentation
There is an economic warning sign which has gone off before every recession going back to the 1960s (and only delivered one false positive). It's called a yield curve inversion — and it just happened on Wednesday. Gulp. Now, this doesn't guarantee a recession, of course. Even going back that far, we're only talking about
America is riven by enormous income inequality. Should Silicon Valley’s very richest pay to make that better? That’s the question behind an intriguing and politically timely new proposal that San Francisco lawmakers plan to put before voters next spring and that could lead to similar efforts across the country: A second-of-its-kind attempt to tax the companies
Worsening economic inequality in recent years is largely the result of policy choices that reflect the political influence and lobbying power of the rich. There is now a self-reinforcing pattern of high profits, low investment, and rising inequality—posing a threat not only to economic growth, but also to democracy. Since reducing inequality became an official goal of
Nearly half of all global pay is scooped up by only 10% of workers, according to the International Labour Organization, while the lowest-paid 50% receive only 6.4%. The lowest-paid 20% – about 650 million workers – get less than 1% of total pay, a figure that has barely moved in 13 years, ILO analysis found. It
"I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” said Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, one of the largest private investment funds in the world. According to Forbes, Dalio ranks 60th on the list of richest people on the planet. “I believe that all good things taken to an extreme become self-destructive and that everything
Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America. This belief system, which I have come to think
In most rich countries, inequality is rising, and has been rising for some time. Many people believe this is a problem, but, equally, many think there’s not much we can do about it. After all, the argument goes, globalisation and new technology have created an economy in which those with highly valued skills or talents
Billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban has proposed a solution for income inequality that doesn’t involve dismantling capitalism: Business owners should give all their employees equity. “The biggest issue for entrepreneurs, for capitalists, for those of us who are successful is, if someone is only going to be paid by the hour...they’re always going to fall behind,” Cuban
In American politics, the issue of income inequality comes up frequently. As wealth continues to concentrate at the top – now the wealthiest 10% of American households control nearly 75% of household net worth – the middle continues to shrink, and some previously thriving metro areas have been hard hit by extreme poverty. But income
Microfinance was once applauded as the world’s most powerful tool for eliminating poverty. But it is now on a slippery slope, moving from good to bad. Microfinance is facing trouble because the purity of its mission has been diluted. When it started, microfinance was a financial tool being used for social good. Now it has
Something is very wrong in the United States and the United Kingdom, renowned epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot told a standing room-only audience at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. While the rich continue to enjoy good health and longer lives, he said, the poor are getting sicker and dying younger. In Baltimore, Md., for
Over the past half-century, climate change has been blamed for heat waves, flooding, and rising seas. Now, researchers say warmer temperatures are widening the chasm separating richer and poorer countries, effectively boosting the economies of many wealthy polluters while dampening growth in much of the developing world. As a result, inequality between the haves and
In New York City, home to our nation’s financial markets, a staggering 74 percent of its students are considered economically disadvantaged. They are parallel worlds, a few miles apart and largely invisible to one another. This is an increasing challenge across our country: How do we build a path to economic mobility for more of
The recent college admissions scandal, which continues to captivate the nation’s attention, has laid bare the issues that have festered at the heart of college admissions for many years. The government’s indictment of parents who illegally manipulated their children’s applications makes clear how wealthy parents obsess on the prestige of certain colleges. It appears that implicated
The two gravest challenges facing America today, economic inequality and geographic divides, are increasingly intertwined. Economic inequality has surged with nearly all the growth being captured by the 1 percent, and the economic fortunes of coastal superstar cities and the rest of the nation have dramatically diverged. These two trends are fundamental to a new study by
