Income inequality is changing how we think, live, and die

Researcher Keith Payne has found something surprising: When people flying coach are forced to walk past the pampered first-class flyers in the front of the plane, the likelihood of some sort of air rage incident rises sharply.

In his 2017 book The Broken Ladder, Payne, a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina, argues that humans are hardwired to notice relative differences. When we’re reminded that we’re poorer or less powerful than others, we become less healthy, more angry, and more politically polarized.

Canadian CEO Pay Is 159 Times More Than The Average Worker's Salary

It's good to be a CEO.

In Canada, the top CEOs make 159 times what the average worker does, according to a human resources consulting firm. But that hardly approaches the ratio you see at the top of a public company in the U.S.

The estimate of CEO pay was drawn up in a recent report by Gallagher McDowall Associates, which is based in Toronto.

Canada's Income Inequality May Be Larger Than Previously Thought: OECD Study

The gap between rich and poor in Canada, and in many developed countries, is wider than previously thought, says a new study from the OECD.

Economists Nicolas Ruiz and Nicolas Woloszko argue in a new working paper that the existing data on income inequality is incomplete because it’s based on household surveys. High-end earners tend to under-report their income in these surveys, they argue.

Another Study Shows Why 'Pulling Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps' Is A Complete Fantasy

In the nearly seven years since the end of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has rebounded on the macro level. But for a huge number of people, the "American dream" remains as elusive as it's ever been.

New research released Monday by the Corporation for Enterprise Development, a nonprofit, illustrates key facts about financial insecurity and inequality in the U.S. -- and shows how these features of our economy put women and people of color at a major disadvantage.

These Maps Show Where Rents Are Going Up and Incomes Are Going Down

Today, the Census Bureau released its latest update to the American Community Survey, publishing a trove of recent data on everything from education levels to economic indicators for the United States' 3,142 counties. The new numbers offer evidence of the lasting effects of the Great Recession and the ongoing financial stagnation faced by most Americans: In counties across the country, poverty rates are up and incomes are down, while rents are rising and home ownership is dropping.

California's Drought Is About Economic Inequality

Bulmario Tapia Madrigal doesn't want to shower in a stream of dirt. He doesn't want to cook with bottled water, haul a bucketful to flush the toilet, or wonder if he has enough water to clean the diabetes wounds on his feet. But since his well went dry three months ago, that's how life has been.

New report warns of growing income gap in Toronto

Toronto’s much-vaunted status as one of the world’s “most livable” cities masks the reality that a sizable underclass of people is missing out on the benefits of life in the Big Smoke, according to a new report on the social and economic standing of the city.

Published Tuesday by the Toronto Foundation, the “Vital Signs 2015” report surveyed recent data from Statistics Canada, academic research and other sources to analyze the quality of life in the city, based on factors such as access to transit, affordable housing, well-paying and stable jobs, sense of belonging and health.

Income inequality: The elephant in the room this election

The need to end the expansion of social inequality and the concentration of wealth of the 1% has gone missing in action in the 2015 federal election campaign trail.

"No party's really campaigning to end inequality or made it a centrepiece of their platform. No leader's tour stop uses inequality as a stage or backdrop," said pollster Marc Zwelling, president of Vector Research.

NDP leader Tom Mulcair and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau do address it indirectly with measures to help, what they call vaguely, a beleaguered "middle class." Mulcair has come out with a national child care plan and a $15 an hour minimum wage for federal workers, while Trudeau has spoken about a single integrated child tax benefit and asking the wealthiest Canadians to pay more tax.

Men Educated At Ivy League Schools Vastly Outearn Female Classmates

Attending the country's most prestigious schools doesn’t make you immune to the unfortunate societal stew of sexism, bias and history that drives the income gap between men and women in the U.S.

Men who graduate from the country’s most exclusive universities vastly outearn their female counterparts, according to startling statistics released over the weekend by the Department of Education.

Three Rich Treasury Secretaries Laugh It Up Over Income Inequality

Three of the world's richest and most powerful people (and Timothy Geithner) had a good laugh over income inequality earlier this year.

Former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson and Geithner were asked about the issue by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg during a conference in Beverly Hills. When Paulson responded that he'd been working on income inequality since his days at Goldman Sachs, Geithner quipped, "In which direction?"

Bernie Sanders Rails Against GOP Budget As Boost To Income Inequality

WASHINGTON -- To Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the new Republican budgets offered this week aren't so much spending blueprints as they are promises to help the rich get richer and boost income inequality.

There are some large differences between the House GOP budget offered Tuesday and the Senate plan unveiled Wednesday. The House version includes deeper cuts to the safety net, for example, along with significantly greater military spending.

But to Sanders, the top minority member of the Senate Budget Committee, neither version of the budget would do much to help working-class Americans, students, the elderly or the sick -- although they both offer plenty of handouts to wealthy taxpayers and corporations.

Income, Not Culture, is What Divides America Now

On rare occasions, a book frames an issue so powerfully that it sets the terms of all future debate.

Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis may do just this for the growing gulf between America’s rich and poor.

I was a member of Putnam’s research team for Our Kids during my studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, where Putnam is a professor of public policy—so I can offer some insights into the research, and explain why the team is optimistic about its impact.

America’s 14 Richest People Made More Money Than Needed to Fund Food Stamps for 50 Million People

Fourteen of the 1 percenters made more from their investments than the $80 billion allotted for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to feed 50 million Americans. And that food assistance budget had been slashed by $8.7 billion due to a lack of federal funding, a cut that hit Americans in need hard but represented a mere tenth of the profits the über rich made on top of other forms of revenue. It gets worse.

Canadian CEOs Earn 206 Times As Much As The Average Worker

The gap between CEO earnings and workers’ pay is wider in Canada than almost anywhere else in the world, according to data from the AFL-CIO.

The U.S. labour group’s database shows Canadian CEOs on average earn 206 times as much as the average worker. That's the second-largest gap among the 17 countries surveyed.

Scott Brown: Birth Control and Equal Pay Are Not 'Issues That People Care About'

New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown avoided talking about his record on reproductive rights and equal pay in a Tuesday appearance on Fox News by suggesting that nobody cares about those issues.

Fox News host Gretchen Carlson asked Brown to address comments from his opponent, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), about his voting record.

"He doesn’t stand up for women’s reproductive rights and economic security," Carlson quoted Shaheen as saying. "He co-sponsored legislation to let employers deny women coverage for birth control or even mammograms. He had two opportunities to vote for equal pay laws and both times he voted no."

Shrinking the Global Income Gap

John Steinbeck allegedly once said: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

That’s part of what activists like the Occupy movement see as the problem in this country today. Americans have been jailed and abused, as we saw in the case of Cecily McMillan, in their efforts to bring the issue of income inequality into the spotlight. Ever since the Occupy movement amplified the battle cry of the 99 percent, the country has been appraised of the fact that a small group of people, to whom we refer as the 1 percent, controls almost 40 percent of the wealth in the U.S. The Fight for $15 movement is still going strong among employees of fast-food restaurants and other low-paid workers, and the debate doesn’t seem likely to go away anytime soon.

The Pay Gap Is Much Wider Than Most Americans Think: Study

Democrats hoping to use income inequality to drive voters to the polls in November face a critical problem: Americans may not know just how well-off the nation’s rich are.

In a recent study, Americans told researchers they thought CEO pay at major corporations was approximately 30 times more than their own. Actually, CEO pay averages 354 times what a worker earns at the same company.

Americans also said they thought the pay gap between CEOs and workers should be approximately 7 to 1. To achieve that ratio, workers would have to make $1.8 million each year, a separate study concluded.

The real war over inequality isn’t between old and young

I turn to Maclean’s if I want to know what idea conservatives will be pushing next. So when I saw a recent copy of the magazine featuring a jarring photo of an old person’s wrinkled hand with the middle finger raised, I realized the Right is gearing up to make generational conflict the next big thing.

Paired with that pic was a cover photo of a smiling, white-haired older woman holding a wad of $50 bills, with many more floating around her head, as if money were raining down on her. The cover headline: “OLD. RICH. SPOILED.”

Don't Believe This Misleading Report About Canadian Income Inequality

You'd think that we live in a caste society with an exclusive few perpetually "controlling" the vast majority of wealth given the stream of media stories on a recent report from the Broadbent Institute. Headlines in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and CBC all trotted out the cliché that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, giving the impression of a doomsday-like wealth inequality gap. Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

The U.S. Is Even More Unequal Than You Realized

When it comes to income inequality, no other developed economy does it quite like the U.S.A. If you need some proof, here it is: