Within the United States, income inequality is most pronounced in the Southern half of the country
This is consistent with a theory that I call Condivergence. It combines convergence with respect to geography and divergence with respect to innate ability.
For two people of equal innate ability, their place of birth matters less than it did fifty years ago. Within the U.S., this means that the South appears to have closed much of the income gap with the rest of the country that existed in the 1930s. Across countries, we have seen incomes rising more rapidly in China, India, and other low-income countries than in the U.S. That is what economists call convergence, or factor-price equalization.
At the same time, however, we have seen a widening of income disparities within regions. House prices in one suburban neighborhood in St. Louis are several times those in a neighborhood just a few miles away. Income inequality has soared within the South, and within the U.S. I see this as a reflecting larger reward differentials for a given differential in innate ability. That is known as divergence.
The two processes are linked. As the effect of geography on income edges down, the effect of innate ability goes up. The winners are people with high ability in erstwhile low-income locations. The losers are people with moderate to low ability in erstwhile middle-income locations.
I think the WSJ may have got this wrong.
The study on which this is all based http://www.prb.org/pdf14/united-states-inequality.pdf mentions 8 states with a GINI coefficient higher than average: California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts and New York. In population terms CA, FL and NY clearly outweigh the others.
The study then goes on to look for counties that have high inequality and high poverty; these are mostly in the South. however, this seems a different phenomenon to the one you allude to.
If you call political savvy and inherited power innate ability.
You mean like the Kennedy family?
I don’t mind people getting rich by expanding a repressed regional economy. On the one hand, I wouldn’t want to expand inequality by lowering the poor. On the other hand, how much can you really exploit the already poor?
Come now, one must question the underlying “statistics” and sources of “facts” that are reported.
What is used as “income?” stats of personal incomes from IRS? Adjustments for benefits? The same is true throughout the WSJ piece. One can’t just take such reports as “facts” without knowing the underlying sources – what is included, what left out, etc.
Take GDP which includes government expenditures (per capita) in part from borrowed funds !!!
We are asked to swim in a polluted tank.
This may not be the place, but some thought might be given to the fact that some of the reduction of “global” income (and consumption) inequalities has occurred as a result of the shift of some of that inequality into the economic structures of the “developed” countries; specifically impacting roughly comparable segments of the latter’s populations proportionately.
Inequality can be an indicator both that the meritocracy is working or not working which makes it a wonderful political football.