Link Banana

Thought-provoking piece Mark Gimien about the irrelevance of the much-touted Gini coefficient in capturing the inequalities of everyday life. His conclusion:

When economists talk about inequality, they are talking about something that can easily be captured in an equation about national income. When noneconomists talk about inequality, however, they have in mind not their neighbor’s wallet, which they can’t see, but their own, which they can. They are thinking of what they can and cannot afford, and also of the most visible extremes of wealth and poverty around them. That’s why India’s Gini index may be lower than our own, and yet it will be the rare person who will say that India is more equal in any sense that matters. When we talk about inequality, it’s not about resentment of the next door neighbors’ pool. It’s about gut issues: whether we feel poor, whether we feel that those around us are poor. That’s why it’s worth thinking about in the first place. Unfortunately, the usual way that economists talk about and measure inequality tells us next to nothing about it.

Harriet Rubin takes a look — I’d like to say hard-hitting, but it hardly feels accurate — at sexual inequality in the workplace. Then, perhaps, this is the reason for it’s squishiness:

This has been the hardest assignment I have ever had. For more than a decade, I’ve covered gender and power in the business world. I’ve analyzed heroes and villains, sinners and saints, and the rest of us in between. I’ve never had so much trouble getting people to talk to me. Nobody really wanted to get into it. Not even the people who would seem to have the most to say. In fact, those people especially would rather not mention it at all.

(via Slate)

New York has an interesting — if not exceptionally deep — photo essay about homelessness in the city. From Nancy’s story (the only one longer than a paragraph):

It’s a cold night—we can see our breath—but under the overpass, Nancy’s warm. “I got, like, six blankets here,” she says, laughing and coughing at the same time. The river bubbles. The glow of a streetlamp shines on the water like moonlight. “The river’s peaceful to me,” she says. She’s been homeless now for almost four years, moving from place to place. She says she likes this spot the best, but as the night goes on, she talks about the sacrifices she’s made, the three children she rarely, if ever, sees—a teenager, a 4-year-old, and a 2-year-old. Talking about the children makes Nancy cry—long, low sobs.

Soon enough, though, she’s better. “I love to cry,” she says. It’s one of the reasons she won’t take Prozac. “When I’m on the mental meds, I don’t like the way I feel,” she says. “I’m not Nancy.”

I feel a certain amount of shame that South Africa’s race relations sound only a little worse than those in the United States. You’d think that our 25 (or, depending on how you count, 125) year head start would count for something. (I know that’s reductive, but it doesn’t change the feeling.)

Though the poor and unemployed remain disproportionately black, an emerging black middle class is slowly blurring racial and social lines. Once-segregated schools and universities now include students of all colours. Even at the formerly all-white University of the Free State, where the racist video was shot and where tuition was once in Afrikaans (the language of the early Dutch settlers), most students are now black. A rising majority of South Africans think that race relations are improving.

Yet South Africa is far from colour-blind. People of different races often eat in the same restaurants—but at different tables. Peaceful coexistence, which South Africa generally enjoys, does not mean integration. People in rural areas are even less likely to mix than those in large cities such as Johannesburg.

The Christian Science Monitor tells of increasing vigilante violence in Mozambique. It all seems to share some similarities with the just-resolved conflict in Kenya.

Rising crime and vigilante justice are quickly becoming serious problems for this donor darling, long considered a stable, postconflict African success story.

The violence reflects growing inequality and increasing mistrust of authorities, observers say – sentiments often hidden beneath widely praised macroeconomic figures showing consistent growth.

“When people do not have trust in the system, when people do not feel that they are part and parcel of problem-solving, they organize themselves,” says Themba Masuku, a senior researcher at the Centre for Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg, South Africa, who has studied vigilante justice. “And they take the law into their own hands.”

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s staggering to see the figures up close.

“It’s a huge difference,” said Sandy Baum, an economist at Skidmore College. “You don’t have to go very far down the food chain before you get to institutions that feel real constraints about how they spend money. Princeton can do what they want to do, but not many schools can.”

Skidmore, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., is not exactly poor; its endowment reached $287 million last year. But the growth alone in Harvard’s endowment last year was $5.7 billion — a sum bigger than all but 14 other universities’ total endowments.