The Influence of Disparity of Incomes on Welfare

For each of 295 cities the disparity or variability in amounts paid for rent (or equivalent in case the home is owned) is computed and used as a rough measure of disparity in the income of the city's families. There is computed also for each city an index, G, of the general goodnes of life for good people from 37 items symptomatic of welfare, and an index, P, of the quality of the population from II items symptomatic of intelligence, morality, and devotion to the family. The intercorrelations of G, P, various scores for parity, the median amount paid for rental, and the 5 percentile rental are computed. From these it appears that for cities indentical in the median rental parity has a balance of .05 1/2i to its credit; for cities identical in the infrequency of extreme poverty parity has a balance of .061/2. It also appears that parity is beneficial only by virtue of its affiliation with P. The practical conclusion is drawn that social efforts should be devoted to improving the quality of a community's residents rather than to equalizing their incomes

Balance (ability) · Demographic economics · Economic growth · Economics · Parity (physics) · Percentile · Political science · Population · Poverty · Renting · Sociology · Statistics · Welfare · Demography · Income, Poverty, and Inequality · Mathematics · Medicine