(Roughly) Daily

Lake Providence lies in East Carroll Parish in the northeast corner of Louisiana…

It’s a place where the air is so soupy-hot your shins sweat; where bugs are such a looping, whirring presence that it can feel like you’re trapped in hell’s version of a snow globe; and where the level of income inequality, as persistent as the bugs and humidity, is higher than any other parish or county in America…

Since the late 1970s, the gap between rich and poor has widened to Grand Canyon proportions — pushing America toward a two-class society. People have a harder time getting ahead now than at any time since the Great Depression.

The nation is more economically split, according to the CIA, than Iran or Nigeria.

East Carroll Parish, population 7,500 and home to Lake Providence, is worse off still…

And of course, the difference makes a difference…

This is well documented in a book called “The Spirit Level” by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Drawing on decades of work, the researchers found, essentially, that people who live in economically unequal places — such as Louisiana or the United States as a whole — tend to live harder lives.

Not just poor people. All people.

When the researchers plotted income inequality against an index of social problems that included infant mortality, mental health and others, they got the chart below, which shows that more unequal places tend to have more of these issues. The United States, the most unequal of the developed countries, for example, also has the world’s highest incarceration rate and a higher infant mortality rate than comparable nations. Sweden, meanwhile, has a low level of income inequality and fares much better on these social measures….

Read the whole story– it’s eminently worth reading the whole story– (with more and bigger, more-legible charts) at “The Most Unequal Place in America.”

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As we mind the gap, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930, in Atlanta, that Jessie Daniel Ames founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

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