Four Ways to Visualize US Income Inquality

Reply-To: Visualizing Economics <catherine@visualizingeconomics.com>

Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Four Ways to Visualize US Income Inquality By Catherine Mulbrandon on Dec 12, 2013 02:56 pm View original post on blog » During the course of making my book, I tried to solve the problem of representing the extreme income inequality in the United States using several different graphic approaches. In some cases, I was working with a single data set like The World Top Incomes Database or the Congressional Budget Office. In others graphics, I combined this data with data from Forbes, IRS, and AR: Absolute Returns + Alpha. Treemap was created using R and the people icons were added in Illustrator, while the cumulative share graphs and the dot plots were create in OmniGraphSkecher.             More to read: 100 years of Family Spending in the US My Vision Statement in Harvard Business Review 6 Real World Examples of Exponential Growth in Powerpoint Sports and Income Changes in Income Growth Rates since 1970 AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO INCOME IN THE UNITED STATES is now available!  A comprehensive collection of infographics, maps and charts looking at the history of incomes and occupations in the United States.

Food Bank Etiquette, or How Not to Be a Bleep at the Food Bank - NPQ - Nonprofit Quarterly

http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/policysocial-context/23390-food-bank-etiquette-or-how-not-to-be-a-bleep-at-the-food-bank.html

Food Bank Etiquette, or How Not to Be a Bleep at the Food Bank

December 11, 2013; xoJane

This post by Deb Martin, a woman who says she was formerly homeless and has had to make use of more than one food bank in the past, is a nice reminder of the Golden Rule as applied to basic needs charity. I like thinking in these terms. Would you want an imperious lecture with your disaster aid, as is described here to have recently happened in the Philippines? And, as she writes, "If you'd be thrilled by the prospect of having that dented can of split pea soup for breakfast, donate it. I'm guessing, though, that there's a reason it's been hanging out in your pantry for the last three years."

Far from suggesting that you need complex guidelines, Ms. Martin suggests keeping it simple:

1. Do not give anything you would not want to eat. Odds are that no one else wants to eat it, either. Grocery stores donate enough dented cans and torn cardboard boxes to cover the "food in scary-looking packages" base. If you wouldn't pick it up off the supermarket shelf, don't put it in the bin.

2. Don't give stupid things. I once received an immense tub of candied fruitcake fruit from a food bank. When I eventually ran out of everything else and ended up eating some of it, I thought, "I am so poor, I've been reduced to eating other people's rejects." Some food is just too horrible to wish on anyone else; throw it out instead.

3. Consider giving food that can be eaten without cooking. When I was homeless, I didn't carry my microwave around. Even living indoors, people have a hard time cooking if their landlord won't fix the broken stove or the power company just shut off the electricity again. That's why some agencies specifically offer no-cook food bags. Think granola bars, crackers (including cheese and cracker packages), spam, tuna, peanut butter, dry milk—anything you'd take on a long hike.

4. Don't give perishable items. This is kind of obvious, but I've seen bread in a donation bin before. Many food pantries get day-old bakery items and imperfect produce from local merchants, and any perishable items you donate will probably be thrown out. Also, leave food in the original packaging. If it needs to be portioned out, volunteers at the food bank will take care of it.

5. Think about people with special dietary needs. It can be difficult for people with food allergies or celiac disease to find donated food they can eat. If you donate gluten-free food, wrap some masking tape around the package and use a marker to write "GLUTEN-FREE" in large print. Do the same for allergen-free items. Clear labeling will help food bank workers get the right food to the right clients. Make sure the food really is what your label says; if you have any doubt, skip it.

6. Make it easy to get at. Aseptic packaging and pouches are better than pull-top cans are better than traditional cans. It sucks even more than usual to be hungry if you've got a perfectly good can of food and no way at all to get the damned thing open. This is especially true for no-cook items; people who need these bags may not have can openers. Avoid glass jars, as they may break during processing.

7. Choose things that don't require elaborate preparation. A boxed cake that says "just add water" is much better than one that wants milk, eggs, vegetable oil, and whatever else it can think of. Instant coffee is great; ground coffee doesn't work for some people. Also good are multitaskers. Bisquick rocks.

8. Keep it simple. I got canned escargot once, which went right into the garbage. There's probably someone out there who'd love to see a can of snails in their bag, but most people will react the way I did. Exotic foods are likely to be tossed and they take up space that could go to things people will actually eat.

9. Ask what's needed. The volunteers at the food bank know what's on the shelves and how far it will go. They may also want donations of non-food items, like soap, toilet paper, tampons/pads, diapers, and pet food because these can't be purchased with food stamps. I never would have guessed that the food bank near my house needs plastic bags—clients are supposed to bring their own, but bags wear out and some people just don't have one. Your local food bank probably needs things you'd never think to give them. Ask.

10.Check your grocery store. Many work with local food pantries to assemble bags of food you can buy and donate for 5 or 10 bucks. It's a really easy way to give.

11.Be nice. Most of what food banks ask for is pretty basic, but I still remember how finding cookies in my bag could make me happy all day. When you're too poor to feed yourself, small things take on more significance. Try to include at least one item you'd choose as a treat for your kids. Someone else's kids will love you.

12.Consider donating cash. Large organizations can get way better deals on food than you can; with ten dollars, Feeding America can provide 90 meals to hungry people. You can give them money here.

We also liked some of the comments, like this one from Celia: "While someone may be interested in eating the bag of organic amaranth I bought on a whim and has been giving me side eye for six months, it is probably better to donate a bag of rice."

And if you liked this, you may also like "Three Ways to Avoid Being a Holiday Charity Nuisance"—Ruth McCambridge

David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show' | World news | The Observer

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire

David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

David Simon, creator of The Wire, near his office in Baltimore. Photograph: Stephen Voss/Redux / eyevine

America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.

There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to America.

I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.

I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.

You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.

That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.

We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we're supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?

And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.

Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.

It's pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess.

After the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how facile it was in creating mass wealth.

Plus, it provided a lot more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the American century.

It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't need, and that was the engine that drove us.

It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.

And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.

Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.

The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it didn't matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.

Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.

That we've gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state's journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we've descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we're all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances.

Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have "some", it doesn't mean that everybody's going to get the same amount. It doesn't mean there aren't going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It's not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don't get left behind. And there isn't a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.

And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.

Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, "Oh by the way I'm not a Marxist you know". I lived through the 20th century. I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don't.

I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.

And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.

And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They would want labour to be diminished because labour's a cost. And if labour is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.

From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.

Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It's a great tool to have in your toolbox if you're trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn't want to go forward at this point without it. But it's not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.

The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?

If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can't even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: "Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I'm going to pay to keep other people healthy? It's socialism, motherfucker."

What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, "Do you have group health insurance where you …?" "Oh yeah, I get …" you know, "my law firm …" So when you get sick you're able to afford the treatment.

The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you're able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you're relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go "Brother, that's socialism. You know it is."

And ... you know when you say, OK, we're going to do what we're doing for your law firm but we're going to do it for 300 million Americans and we're going to make it affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you're going to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for the other guys in the law firm … Their eyes glaze. You know they don't want to hear it. It's too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.

So I'm astonished that at this late date I'm standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don't mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don't embrace some other values for human endeavour.

And that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.

That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.

And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?

So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's going to get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.

We're either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we're going to keep going the way we're going, at which point there's going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody's going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there's always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm losing faith.

The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn't there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.

The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.

Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.

So I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.

David Simon is an American author and journalist and was the executive producer of The Wire. This is an edited extract of a talk delivered at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.

Solar Citizen: Allies In Defense of Solar

The coal SOBs trying to destroy a livable climate for humanity hate the idea of anyone escaping from pouring money in their pockets.

Allies Emerge for Solar Advocates on both sides of the blue-red divide  rally to protect roof-top solar By Seth Masia   In 1989, a power engineer for Pacific Gas & Electric Co. named Dan Shugar proved that distributed solar reduced the peak loads handled by transmission lines and transformers. This meant that a utility company could save a lot of money by encouraging small solar installations scattered around its service territory. When air conditioning loads are met in part by power generated in the neighborhood, it reduces the need for expensive new power lines from central generating plants. It even reduces the need for expensive new generating plants.   That's still true. The more distributed power comes on the grid, the less ratepayers must pay for new and upgraded facilities. A number of municipal utility districts (notably in Sacramento, Calif. and Austin, Texas) have made good use of distributed power to cut their maintenance and infrastructure costs. Austin utility calculates that the value of solar to its own operations is more that 12 cents per kilowatt-hour, and that's what it pays for rooftop power. The argument was so persuasive that over the years, 43 states have adopted net-metering rules to encourage distributed solar.   But investor-owed utility companies (IOUs) don't see it that way. What they see is that they make money by selling electricity, and owners of rooftop solar buy less of that. And they see that they have traditionally made money by building new generating and transmission facilities (most regulated utilities are allowed to earn a profit on everything they build or buy, from nuclear plants to coal).   Many utilities now recognize that they can make money building large solar and wind farms, with the transmission lines to handle the new capacity. The cost is passed on to ratepayers, and the electricity is sold just as if it came from a coal or nuclear or hydro plant.   But distributed generation, owned by homeowners, ranchers, farmers or leasing companies, is a serious threat to a utility's business plan. In January, 2013, the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) - a research organization funded by the utility industry - called distributed generation and net metering a "disruptive" threat, and made the following recommendation: While net metering policies vary by state, generally customers with rooftop solar or other DG systems are credited for any electricity they sell via the electric power grid. Electric companies are required to buy this power typically at the full retail rate, which includes all of the fixed costs of the poles, wires, meters, advanced technologies, and other infrastructure that makes the grid safe, reliable, and able to accommodate solar panels or other DG systems. Through the credit they receive, net-metered customers effectively are avoiding paying these costs for the grid. As a result, these costs are shifted to those customers without rooftop solar or other DG systems through higher utility bills.  Net metering policies and rate structures in many states should be updated so that everyone who uses the electric grid helps pay to maintain it and to keep it operating reliably at all times. This will ensure that all customers have safe and reliable electricity and that electric rates are fair and affordable for all customers. In effect, EEI chose to ignore the work done by Dan Shugar's team 24 years ago. The industry now claims that non-solar ratepayers support the grid infrastructure and solar ratepayers do not.   And so, over the past year, utilities in California, Arizona, Georgia and Colorado have sought to add a surcharge to the monthly electricity bills paid by the owners of rooftop solar arrays. In California, the nation's largest and most progressive solar market, IOUs backed Assembly Bill 327, which would have imposed a flat $10 fee on all ratepayers as a regressive way to support the grid infrastructure; and it would have ended net metering next year. The solar industry and solar homeowners fought back and got the bill amended into something much more solar-friendly. When signed into law in August, AB 327 continues net metering and gives the California Public Utilities Commission authority to lift caps on net metering and even on the 33-percent renewable portfolio standard. In Arizona, the IOU Arizona Public Service asked for permission to impose up to $50 monthly surcharge on electric bills paid by net-metered homeowners and small businesses. Free-market conservatives led by Barry Goldwater, Jr. joined with solar advocates to fight the new fee. While the state's Corporation Commission generally agreed that APS needed the fee, in November they slashed it 90 percent. New solar system owners will for now have to pay 70 cents per kilowatt of installed capacity, per month, or about $4.90 for 7kW system. It's a setback but not a show stopper for solar installations. The door is open, however, for the Commission to raise the fee in years to come, so the battle will continue. Georgia Power was dead set against any form of solar power. Consumers - conservative and conservationist alike - were enraged when the IOU pushed through a surcharge to support construction of nuclear power plants. The result:  Tea Party and Sierra Club activists came together as the Green Tea Coalition. They lobbied hard, cited Austin's value-of-solar experience,  and in July convinced the Public Service Commission to mandate 525 MW of solar power. Click here for the full story. That same month, in Colorado, Xcel Energy filed its power delivery plans for 2014. The company said that its value of solar was only 4.6 cents per kWh, and it wants to slash the net-metering rate, currently set at the retail electricity rate of 10.5 cents. And it wants to impose a monthly grid-maintenance charge. The solar industry will fight back vigorously. Hearings are set to begin Feb. 3. Challenges will be mounted to distributed energy in more states. Local solar advocates need to follow utility-company actions closely and be prepared to respond.   In the meantime, energy free choice has emerged as an issue that can unite solar advocates from the right and left. In the spirit of the season, it's time to reach out to your neighbors of all political persuasions, and make common cause over energy independence.   You can help! Join and support your local chapter  of the American Solar Energy Society.   And join ASES today!   Take Action! Share this email with others! Stay Connected       Solar Citizen is a program of the American Solar Energy Society. Learn more, and share this email with a friend.

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