By: John Besl
The campsites are gone from Piatt Park in downtown Cincinnati, but the discontent behind the “Occupy Cincinnati” protest movement continues to simmer, and the original “Occupy Wall Street” protest drags on. A familiar criticism of the protests goes like this, “What do they want, and what exactly are they protesting against?” Boiled down to its essence, the short answer is income inequality, whereby “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.” I’d like to use the space this month to report on this timely topic, first describing recent national trends, then drilling down with new state and metropolitan data from the American Community Survey. Finally, we’ll highlight a single Cincinnati census tract that ranks first on a key measure of income inequality among some 60,000 tracts nationwide.
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