Income Inequality

Our Mission

What is income inequality in America and why should it matter to you? Our goal is to help you understand what income inequality looks like and to identify the many components that make up what it takes to live and to thrive in the United States today.

To do so, we've compiled data and developed visualizations from many different aspects of income inequality in order to establish a storyline of what it looks like today and how you fit into the overall picture. A key component of this picture is the notion of a living wage. To highlight this, we've developed the interactive MIDS Living Wage Explorer which allows you to view today's living wage at a county level, comparing different locations and different versions of a "living wage model". Above all, we hope that you view this tool as an advocate for exploration and education. Income inequality is a serious issue in the United States and it is our hope that this tool will lay the foundation for understanding what you can do to help resolve it for future generations.

Our Project

We have compiled an improved living wage model based on over 40 data sources and over 1000 datasets to provide estimates of a living wage in each county of the United States. We provide a simple tool to visualize and compare the living wage based on several different models and family types. Head on over to the main website for our project to learn about the living wage, income inequality, the welfare gap, and more!