The Damaging Effects of Inequality

Belief in opportunity is a bedrock American value. The lure of the hope that your circumstances will be dictated by your ability and your effort is the primary motivation that brings people from the rest of the world to our shores. Central to a belief in opportunity is the ideal of equality – the thought that we all begin from the same starting line.

That dream lies at the core of the American self-concept, and yet, we’ve failed to realize the dream for many. As noted in a thought-provoking article in the Washington Post¹, recent unemployment numbers for young African American men are three times those for the general population. Even for people who have jobs, the picture is not rosy. According to the most up-to-date statistics released by the government, the median wage for Hispanic workers was 71.6% of the median wage for white workers². The median wage for African American workers was 75.6% of the median wage for white workers³.

These differences are not just numbers on a page or statistical ephemera. In addition to dictating vastly different circumstances for many, this data means higher rates of infant mortality, obesity, and mental illness for us all. Two British epidemiologists—Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett—have posited a theory that the level of economic equality within a society has a strong correlation to indicators of social health. In US states with a higher level of income inequality, drop out rates are higher, as are rates of teenage pregnancy. Poor people are not the only ones affected, either—middle-income people in the United States have shorter lifespans than those in Japan, Sweden, and other countries that are deemed more equal. Lack of equality damages everyone.

The overwhelming results of the economic downturn offer a unique chance to ensure the promise of opportunity. Rebuilding the American economy provides the possibility that we may eliminate the barriers to opportunity that face many of us. The stimulus—an unprecedented public investment—must be implemented with an eye to ensuring opportunity.

With this in mind, The Opportunity Agenda devised a new and promising policy strategy to ensure that publicly supported projects provide equal and expanding opportunity to all communities: The Opportunity Impact Statement. As a unitary evaluation instrument that public bodies, affected communities, and the private sector can use to ensure that programs and projects offer equal and expanded opportunity for everyone in a community or region, as required by law, the OIS is designed to promote careful consideration of significant opportunity impacts arising from proposed federally-funded projects. It creates a single formal evaluation procedure that both assures an opportunity for meaningful public participation in the agency’s consideration of the proposed action and avoids duplicative or uncoordinated attempts at complying with equal opportunity mandates after the fact.

1 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/23/AR200911...
2 - U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement, “Historical Poverty Tables – People,” Table P-36, Accessed on 8 December 2009 at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/incpertoc.html and http://opportunityagenda.org/stateofopportunity/indicators/equality#foot...
3 - Ibid