Law Commons^™

Equity By The Numbers: Measuring Poverty, Inequality, And Injustice, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Can we measure inequity? Can we arrive at a number or numbers capturing the extent to which a given society is equitable or inequitable? Sometimes such questions are answered with a “no”: equity is a qualitative, non-numerical consideration.

This Article offers a different perspective. The difficulty with equity measurement is not the impossibility of quantification, but the overabundance of possible metrics. There currently exist at least four families of equity-measurement frameworks, used by scholars and, to some extent, governments: inequality metrics (such as the Gini coefficient), poverty metrics, social-gradient metrics (such as the concentration index), and equity-regarding social welfare functions. …

Occupying America: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The American Dream, And The Challenge Of Socio-Economic Inequality, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Why The Eitc Doesn’T Make Work Pay, Anne L. Alstott

Law and Contemporary Problems

Alstott offers an evaluation of the significance of the credit and, in a historical spirit, hark back to an earlier, critical perspective on the earned income tax credit (EITC)--a perspective rarely heard in recent years. She argues that these concerns remain apt, despite the expansion of the EITC and oft-repeated praise for its importance as an antipoverty program. Moreover, she highlights three features of U.S. law that constrain the effectiveness of the EITC in improving the wellbeing of low-income workers and their children: labor and employment laws that structure markets that produce low wages and harsh working conditions, laws that …

Well-Being, Inequality And Time: The Time-Slice Problem And Its Policy Implications, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Should equality be viewed from a lifetime or "sublifetime" perspective? In measuring the inequality of income, for example, should we measure the inequality of lifetime income or of annual income? In characterizing a tax as "progressive" or "regressive," should we look to whether the annual tax burden increases with annual income, or instead to whether the lifetime tax burden increases with lifetime income? Should the overriding aim of anti-poverty programs be to reduce chronic poverty: being badly off for many years, because of low human capital or other long-run factors? Or is the moral claim of the impoverished person a …

Show Me The Money: The Dominance Of Wealth In Determining Rights Performance In Asia, Randall Peerenboom

Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law

No abstract provided.

Citizen Soldiers: The North Carolina Volunteers And The War On Poverty, Robert R. Korstad, James L. Leloudis

Law and Contemporary Problems

During the summers of 1964 and 1965, more than 300 college students fanned out across the state of North Carolina in a bold campaign to defeat poverty and, as they saw it, to uplift the poor. Korstad and Leloudis trace the history of the North Carolina Fund's Volunteers program, provide an analysis of the contribution that those students made to fighting poverty in the state, and evaluate the impact of that experience on the lives of the Volunteers themselves.