development

by Lisa R. Pruitt Wealth and income inequality have been getting a lot of attention in recent months--at least in the New York Times. Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert has been especially persistent about keeping the topic on readers' radar screens; read some of his columns here, here, here, and here. Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and Robert Frank have had a say, too. Wealth inequality was also the subject of a "Room for Debate" feature a few weeks ago. But geographic analysis of inequality has been little examined in the mainstream media until The Economist Magazine ran a couple of stories about uneven development and spatial inequality in the March 10, 2011 issue. The first "Internal affairs: The gap between rich and poor regions widened because of the recession," analyzes various nations' spatial inequality as measured by income and GDP. This analysis shows that Britain is the nation with the widest geography-based income gap: the per capita GDP is nine times greater in central London than it is in some Welsh regions. The smallest regional spreads, on the other hand, were in Italy and Germany, where "incomes in their most affluent areas are [nevertheless] almost three times those of the poorest." The United States falls at the British end of the spectrum, coming in second for inequality across regions among the nations studied. The District of Columbia, for example, is five times as rich as Mississippi. Further, the situation has worsened in the past few years.

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt I've been thinking a lot (and writing some, too) about the links between poverty and place for several years, spurred by my interest in rural populations and critical geography.  I have become increasingly convinced that place plays a profound role in who is impoverished and who isn't.  Think about how unevenly our own nation is developed and the spatial inequalities that result in terms of access to education, jobs, and both public and private services.  (Some recent articles are here and here). So it's not surprising that this item recently in the New York Times caught my eye:  "Was Today's Poverty Determined in 1000 BC?"  The story by Catherine Rampell reports on a recent study by Diego Comin, William Easterly and Erick Gong.  They gathered "gathered crude information on the state of technological development in various parts of the world in 1000 B.C.; around the birth of Jesus; and in A.D. 1500" and then compared this to current per capita income in today's nation states.   Rampell's report is accompanied by a scatterplot that depicts the relationship between a country's present wealth and the state of its technological development in A.D. 1500.  It turns out that the latter is "an extraordinarily reliable predictor" of the former.

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt The closing line of my recent blog post asked:  "Is even democracy a luxury for the poor?" Shortly after writing it, I came across this quote by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, featured in the obituary of Senator Robert C. Byrd who died last week.  Regarding the vast federal aid that Byrd garnered for West Virginia over the years, Rockefeller said Byrd knew that “before you can make life better, you have to have a road to get in there, and you have to have a sewerage system.” This comment resonated with me, struck me as accurate.  Yet it ran counter to my thinking about Robert C. Byrd for the past few decades.  While I have always considered Byrd a fine man (well, aside from his Klan membership as a younger man) and appreciated his dedication to the Senate, I saw him primarily as a poster child for the excesses of pork barrel politics.  Rarely was he in the news, it seems, without some mention of the federal aid he was able to channel to West Virginia.  Indeed, his obituary in the New York Times states that he built, "always with canny political skills, a modern West Virginia with vast amounts of federal money."  Elsewhere, it includes this quote from Senator Byrd himself, “I lost no opportunity to promote funding for programs and projects of benefit to the people back home.”  He referred to West Virginia as "one of the rock bottomest of states."