Friday was seen as good news for employment. Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 271,000 jobs in October. Unemployment dropped to 5 percent. Excellent, right?
Certainly, until you begin to dig into the numbers. What is good on the average is bad for many. The seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate for white men 20 and over was actually 4.1 percent. Unemployment for white women in the same age range was only 3.9 percent. Both were steady from September. Whites from 16 to 19 years old saw unemployment drop from 13.9 percent in September to 13.8 percent.
If you were African American, the picture was completely different. Overall, unemployment was 9.2 percent. For men over 20 and older it was 9.2 percent, up from 8.9 percent in September. African-American women 20 and older saw their unemployment rate increase from 8.0 percent to 8.1 percent. There was a big improvement for 16-to-19 year olds. The unemployment rate was 25.6 percent, down from September's 31.5 percent.
Disparities abound in every meaningful way you can mention. If you're black, you've got a shorter expected life span, far less education, worse economic prospects, and significantly lower wealth. You are, however, far more likely to land in prison.
We discuss systemic problems of inequality in the language of averages, which is mathematically inadequate. You could look at median values, but they by themselves are inadequate as well because they cannot demonstrate the distribution that governs inequality. But, to make life easier, we tend to look at the world in simplistic ways, which makes addressing systemic issues like inequality virtually impossible.
There is no single answer to the problem, whether it comes in the form of telling people to get jobs and work hard (many of the poor work multiple jobs but find it impossible to get ahead) or suggesting that massive taxes on the wealthiest is the solution (the government gets more money, but not the poor). Income inequality isn't relegated to African-Americans. Native Americans suffer massively from it, as do many Latinos, whites, and Asians (even with an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent). Wealth and income inequality affect the middle class as well. It is an issue that involves social structures, class, legally-enshrined privilege, corporate irresponsibility, and prejudice, among others.
Addressing complex problems is, no surprise, a complex issue. Trying to grasp all the nuances can be overpowering and make action impossible. Engineers face this all the time. Without some gross simplifications, designing systems and products would never happen because the full problems cannot be addressed in any reasonably efficient way. They would require supercomputers to run for untold years to come close to solving the full expression of real world conditions.
But the engineers realize that they are taking shortcuts and avoid ones that grossly under simplify what they try to do. We need to find an analogous approach to address wealth and income inequality. To think that you improve a social condition like drug use by sending millions of people to jail, letting families fall apart, never provide therapy or treatment, and then eventually putting those people with broken lives back onto the street is ludicrous. To claim that the economy is "improving" when unemployment increases for significant segments of the population is delusional. We can't solve what we won't look at.
There is no silver bullet, but taking action in a range of areas such as expanding and improving education, increasing the minimum wage, providing a full solution to health care access, giving bigger tax breaks to lower income people for child care costs, and offering people who rent their homes equivalent tax breaks to those who own might be a start.
Inequality is a systemic problem. Anything less than a systemic response is wishful thinking.
