poverty

Primaries in Oregon and Kentucky drew attention to the salience of the white working class vote.

There was every reason to believe that the primaries in Oregon and Kentucky would end with Senator Barack Obama winning a majority of pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention, reinforcing the widespread sense that Senator Clinton is at this point running a vanity campaign, a highly expensive effort to enhance her self-esteem. Thoughts naturally turn to the general election, in which Oregon and Kentucky (and states very much like them) will prove crucially important to building an electoral-college majority. Both have an unusually high proportion of white working class voters, as Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz note in a brilliant report on the changing class composition of the American electorate, and this represents a challenge to Obama, who has (as Clinton reminds us incessantly) had a hard time connecting with these voters.

Economists debate how we should think about inequality. Should we focus on income, wealth, or consumption?

After W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published a short piece on inequality in the New York Times, economists led by Paul Krugman charged them of using misleading numbers to present a rosy picture of the lives of America's working poor. For Cox and Alm, the relevant inequalities are inequalities in consumption, and they note that inequality in consumption is far less extreme than inequality in income. By extension, the same is true of wealth. Say it's true, for the sake of argument, Cox and Alm are right: that in terms of consumption, today's poor are far better off than the poor of thirty years ago, and that they aren't that much worse off than the rich when it comes to the quantity and quality of their consumption. It remains true that wealth translates into political power and that political power allows some individuals to entrench their power, political, economic, and cultural. So even if it is silly to argue that poor Americans are among the wretched of the Earth, the real danger could be that the rich are becoming a cosseted, self-dealing elite that uses the state to insulate itself from robust competition.