There was a fascinating post the other day on Matthew Kahn’s excellent Environmental and Urban Economics blog that detailed some counter-intuitive data about racial inequality in the US. One of the charts seems fitting for this site:
This is one of a few charts that Kahn uses to illustrate that, despite everything, the gap in racial equality has been slowly narrowing, at least when averaged out across the US. That said, Minnesota ranks particularly poorly on measures like this. And when you’re comparing today’s problems to the racial inequality of the 60s and 70s, improvement is a low bar. So don’t get complacent.
(PS. This kind of data is one reason that “renters” is often a code word for race in urban conversations.)