How Much Of An Income Gap Is “Too” Much?

The Article: The Income Gap: How Much Is Too Much? by Yuki Noguchi in NPR.

The Text: In the debate over income inequality, the right and left seem to agree on one point: The U.S. is the land more of equal opportunity than equal outcomes.

But what’s the real relationship between the growing income gap and opportunity? A new report out last week has triggered more debate about the haves and the have-nots.

The study, led by Raj Chetty of Harvard University, says it’s not any harder to achieve economically in the U.S. today than it was 20 years ago. That flies in the face of growing criticism that the income gap is putting some opportunities beyond the reach of average Americans.

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Obama Gets Real About Weed, Prohibitionists Get Pissed

The Article: The President Forgets To Lie About Marijuana, And Prohibitionists Are Outraged by Jacob Sullum in Forbes.

The Text: Prohibitionists were outraged by President Obama’s recent observation that marijuana is safer than alcohol—not because it is not true but because it contradicts the central myth underlying public support for the war on drugs. According to that myth, certain psychoactive substances are so dangerous that they cannot be tolerated, and the government has scientifically identified them. In reality, the distinctions drawn by our drug laws are arbitrary, and marijuana is the clearest illustration of that fact.

“As has been well documented,” Obama told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in an interview published on Sunday, “I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.” When Remnick pressed him to say whether marijuana is in fact less dangerous than alcohol, the president said yes, “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer.”

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One Man On His Life Sentence For Crimes He Didn’t Commit

The Article: Today I am 75, and facing death in a US jail for murders I didn’t commit by Kris Maharaj in The Guardian.

The Text: The day was 26 January 1972. It was quite a celebration. I don’t remember why I planned a special birthday party that year – I was turning 33 – but I suppose I was at the height of my good fortune. My fruit importation business had gone spectacularly well, and I had fallen in love with the horses. So I held the party at Kempton Park racecourse. I had a runner that day – if I recall correctly, it was Golden Ridge – and all my friends gathered around. They were happy days, and I basked in my good luck.

How different it is today.

This year I will celebrate my 75th birthday at the South Florida Reception Centre just outside Miami, USA. I will be roused by the prison guards at five in the morning. At six, there will be grits for breakfast, along with something they call “chicory” (there is no real coffee). After my insulin shot, I will be locked back down until around 9.30am. Then I should get a couple of hours on the yard, along with 600 other “inmates”.

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The Lives Of 27 Year Olds In Charts

The Article: Highly Educated, Highly Indebted: The Lives of Today’s 27-Year-Olds, In Charts by Jordan Weissman in The Atlantic.

The Text: What’s are today’s young adults really like? For those who’ve spent too much time gazing into the dark recesses of Thought Catalog or obsessing over “Girls,” the Department of Education has a new report that offers up some enlightening answers.

In the spring of 2002, the government’s researchers began tracking a group of roughly 15,000 high school sophomores—most of whom would be roughly age 27 today—with the intention of following them through early adulthood. Like myself, many of those students graduated college in 2008, just in time to grab a front-row seat for the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the economic gore fest that ensued. In 2012, the government’s researchers handed their subjects an enormous survey about their lives in the real world. Here, I’ve pulled together the most interesting findings.

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Now, Even The Wealthy Are Worried About Inequality

The Article: Inequality may spark unrest, Davos elites worry by David Cay Johnston in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: There’s trouble coming as the chasm between the richest of the rich and everyone else continues to widen. So says a report prepared by the World Economic Forum, the nonprofit foundation that hosts its annual conference of business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, popular with the world’s billionaires.

The forum’s 14th annual assessment of risks, issued just ahead of the Davos gathering, makes clear that social instability, whether measured in mere riots or in bloody revolutions, is the likely outcome of increasing inequality.

The report speaks of a lost generation of young people worldwide who are finishing school only to find a paucity of jobs, which in turn creates pressure to lower wages.

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