Mapping America’s Stark Wage Inequality

One of the most important economic stories of the past couple of decades is the rise of economic inequality in the United States and around the world. As readers of CityLab know, inequality is stark in the “superstar” cities that power advanced economies.

In a new study, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York document this phenomenon in America’s leading cities and knowledge hubs. Jaison Abel (with whom I have previously collaborated) and Richard Deitz track the rise in wage inequality for the country as a whole and across some 200 metropolitan areas over the period 1980 to 2015. Thomas Piketty and Paul Krugman have suggested that 1980 was a tipping point, when advanced economies (and the U.S. in particular) shifted from convergence to greater divergence and inequality across classes and regions.