I was driving through East Boston with my daughter last weekend to get to my place in Winthrop, and I explained that East Boston was a fun place to hang out in but was a relatively poor neighborhood. She looked at me with a very curious look and said, "but how poor can they be, they all have satellite dishes and most of the cars on the side of the road are newer than yours?"
Poverty appears to be a relative term. In America there are different levels of income and wealth but most people at the bottom are only temporarily there (the raw Census Bureau numbers and every study show this so please don't argue that point), and our bottom is equivalent to or above most countries' middle and is a lot higher than what our bottom was a generation ago.
If we're going to judge our economy, shouldn't we compare our bottom to where it was and to other countries' bottoms, and consider our absolute economic mobility, rather than just compare our bottom to our top?
2007-01-23
06:32:05
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14 answers
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asked by
Anonymous
in
Elections