The presidential campaign and the Occupy movement have thrust inequality into the spotlight -- and with good reason. When it comes to income inequality, the United States is on par with Gabon, Sri Lanka, and Tunisia; in fact, our country has greater inequality than 66 other nations, including every other...

The Census Bureau recently released the supplemental poverty measure (SPM). By this gauge, 49.1 million Americans, or 16 percent of the population, live in poverty -- more than the official poverty number of 46.2 million, or 15.1 percent of the population, reported in September.

The...

Which causes more deaths in the United States: heart attacks or failure to graduate high school? Strokes or racial segregation? Lung cancer or poverty? The surprising answer is that poverty and its attendant deprivations are deadlier than disease.

For years, poverty has been cited as a contributing factor to poor...

How do you define a better life? The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of 34 countries comprised chiefly of the world's affluent democracies, is taking its turn to answer this ageless question with its Better Life Initiative. This interactive tool and index draws attention...

California has long been a leader in implementing progressive policies and developing innovative programs to improve the lives and broaden the opportunities of its people. From education to environment, California has been at the forefront. But the Golden State is at risk of losing this edge, disinvesting in the very...

After a year of vociferous debate, health care reform passed. But the unprecedented attention to Americans' health somehow managed to miss one of the country's most alarming health problems: the huge disparities in health outcomes for different population groups.

How big are these disparities?

They are huge. Recent research by...

Stop five men and five women on the street outside an elementary school and ask them the shoe size of their youngest child, or the phone number of that child’s pediatrician. Odds are, the women will know both, the men neither. Much ink is being spilled lately to probe the...

As often happens, the just-completed Pittsburgh G-20 meeting ended with admirable pronouncements, among them, the "responsibility to invest in people by providing education, job training, decent work conditions, health care...and to fight poverty, discrimination, and all forms of social exclusion". But with the near-exclusive use of GDP growth as the...

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi and Louisiana four years ago, extreme weather and acute human vulnerability met head-on with tragic results. Long-standing gaps in the well-being of different groups of Gulf coast residents were suddenly everywhere in evidence - on rooftops, on I-10 overpasses, and on TV screens...

High school dropout rates have been in the news a lot lately. Last month saw the release of two major reports that drew renewed attention to the issue. One from the America's Promise Alliance found that in the fifty largest cities in the U.S., nearly half of all high school...