'On Your Left'

With a heightened focus on the mostly poor and predominantly black families in New Orleans who have suffered from governmental indifference, not only now but for years, there was a seemingly unrelated item in the Sunday New York Times that caught my attention. It's not that New Orleans is any different than the rest of the country--rather, it has forced us to see our two-tiered society at work, at its worst. We have been building and ignoring little pieces of New Orleans all over the country. From the story in the New York Times, September 4, 2005:

The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now make 52 times what the lowest fifth make - $365,826 compared with $7,047 - which is roughly comparable to the income disparity in Namibia, according to the Times analysis of 2000 census data. Put another way, for every dollar made by households in the top fifth of Manhattan earners, households in the bottom fifth made about 2 cents.

That represents a substantial widening of the income gap from previous years. In 1980, the top fifth of earners made 21 times what the bottom fifth made in Manhattan, which ranked 17th among the nation's counties in income disparity.

By 1990, Manhattan ranked second behind Kalawao County, Hawaii, a former leper colony with which it had little in common except for that signature grove of palm trees at the World Financial Center. The rich in Manhattan made 32 times the average of the poor then, or $174,486 versus $5,435.