Tag Archives: wealth gap

Other “One Percents”

Posted on May 18, 2025 | Leave a comment

As wealth and income gaps in the U.S. widen, complaints grow about “the top 1%” economically. We suspect the very wealthy of using tax loopholes, unfair competition, lobbying, abuse of public office, and various government policies to further enrich themselves while many of the rest of us languish.

A one percent figure is a somewhat arbitrary cutoff, but can be useful shorthand for “a small proportion” in any given field. Percentages for nearly everything also may change over time. Thinking about wealthy “one percenters” got me to wondering about other examples of contemporary low percentages. Below, then, are some other “one percents” in the U.S. and globally: farmers, legal (and illegal) immigrants, redheads, intersex persons, Icelanders.

Way back when the first U.S. census was taken in 1790, about 90% of the country’s roughly 4 million people were farmers. Over many decades, population increased and farms generally consolidated. Most became more highly mechanized. The number of farms dwindled over time, along with the proportion of farmers. At the latest U.S. agricultural census, in 2022, only 1.2% of the U.S. labor force were farmers, albeit very productive ones. (Domestic farmers produce over 85% of the food and beverages purchased in the United States. The U.S. is the world’s leading exporter of corn and rice by volume, and has generally been the world’s leading exporter of soybeans by value.)

Our “country of immigrants” has seen vast changes in its levels of immigration. One measure of legal immigration is the number of “green cards” issued for new Legal Permanent Residents. In 1820, the first year to register immigration status, only 8,400 new LPR’s were admitted. Then, our total population was about 9.6 million, so registered immigrants accounted for less than 0.1% of Americans. During the 19th century, immigration levels increased, reaching an initial peak in 1854. That year, 427,800 LPR’s were admitted to our country. Because since 1820, we’d added new states and increased our total population to over 23 million people, the 1854 LPR proportion was between 1 and 2% of the total population at the time. Still, that year’s number of LPR’s was an over 50-fold increase from the 1820 figure.

Twentieth century U.S. immigration reached an all-time low in 1933 during the Great Depression, with just 23,100 LPR’s among a total population of over 125 million, less than 0.02%. Until after the end of World War II, U.S. immigration rates stayed very low. An all-time high in legal immigration came in 1991, when over 1.8 million LPR’s were admitted, somewhat less than 1% of our then total population of about 250 million. (source for historic immigration figures: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Annual-Number-of-US-Legal-Permanent-Residents?width=850&height=850&iframe=true).

Most estimates of the number of “illegals” in the U.S., immigrants whose documentation is either missing or invalid, range between 10 and 15 million. Reliable numbers are hard to establish. However, even at the high end, this is less than 5% of the U.S. 2020 census population of over 331 million.

I was born a redhead, one among a roughly estimated 4% of the U.S. population. Until fairly recently, I was the only known auburn-haired child in our extended family. My grandparents sometimes recalled a distant cousin who maybe had red hair like me. Generally my family liked my red hair. However, once I started school, I got mild teasing from some blond or darker haired classmates.

As gender identity debates continue to roil our “culture wars,” I recently learned of a category new to me, the poorly understood phenomenon of “intersex.” Being intersex is definitely biological, not a choice. It begins in the womb. As fetuses, intersex individuals acquire some genital and sex-linked characteristics of both female and male. Young woman-with-balls Emily Quinn is among the best known intersex Americans. (Another well-known intersex person is South African Olympic athlete, runner Caster Semenya.) In her 2018 TED talk, Emily estimates that she/he is one among more than 150 million living humans with mixed female and male characteristics. (Without extensive biological testing, it can sometimes be hard to tell if someone is intersex.) If accurate, Emily’s figure represents between 1 and 2% of the global human population of over 8 billion.

Iceland is a small island nation in the northern Atlantic whose population is only about 0.1% of the U.S. total. Iceland has many unique characteristics, but the one that most buoys my sense of possibilities is that it has the smallest “gender pay gap” of any developed country. By 2024, U.S. women’s access to high-income professions had improved. A former gender pay gap of 60 cents on the dollar had been cut by over half. U.S. women now earn nearly 84 cents for every dollar paid to similarly qualified men. In Iceland, women earn nearly 92% of men’s compensation, not yet quite equal, but an inkling that gender pay parity is possible.

Some of the figures above give me hope; they also provide food for thought. However, my main concern as I continue to age isn’t any of them. It’s the small but increasing proportion of elders with their mental and physical faculties in decent shape. Even into their 80’s and 90’s, they continue to be alert, contributing members of their communities. They are a 1% I hope to be able to join!

Building Lop-Sided Bridges

Posted on November 6, 2019 | Leave a comment

Building Lop-Sided Bridges —by Jinny Batterson

About this time of year in 1997, I got a nasty shock. I was diagnosed with breast cancer. A set of cells had gone malignant and might soon invade the rest of my body. Several months earlier, I’d had my annual mammogram and was told it was normal. So at first, I wrote off the lump that showed up around Hallowe’en as just another annoying symptom of menopause. I was a healthy, middle-aged white woman. I ate well, exercised regularly, had gotten all my prescribed screenings. I made a comfortable living as a consultant, had two college-age sons, a husband who loved me, and no family history of breast cancer. The lump would go away on its own. It didn’t. Further tests showed an aggressive tumor. By early December, I’d had a modified radical mastectomy without reconstruction. I was pretty shaky both physically and mentally.

As I began to heal, I tried to use my experiences as a teaching tool. Our Unitarian-Universalist congregation in Richmond, Virginia had long engaged in efforts to help promote racial healing. Each year about the time of the MLK holiday, we had a special service with a racial justice theme. This particular year, I’d been working for several months before my diagnosis on the planning committee for the service. As I began to regain strength after surgery, I asked if I could do a short talk about my “lop-sidedness,” using my body as a metaphor for the way our entire society was lop-sided and hampered by our history of individual prejudice and systemic racism. We all needed healing. I composed and rehearsed my talk. By early January I was confident that I’d have the physical stamina and the psychological strength to deliver a 10-minute talk, even with the prospect of six months of chemotherapy looming.

Then I went to choir rehearsal. Our young choir director wanted to use spirituals to accompany the service. He’d chosen “Soon I will be done with the troubles of this world, goin’ home to live with God…” as the meditation hymn. I flinched. Jamie was a wonderful musician, but I really didn’t want to identify with that particular song at that particular time in my life. Privately, I asked if we could substitute something more upbeat. I got a reprieve. We wound up singing “I’m so busy servin’ my Master, ain’t got time to die…” Both the congregation and I survived to continue our work.

A decade later, I learned that my favorite college roommate had developed breast cancer. Beth had grown up near Richmond, graduated from our small liberal arts school, then gotten an advanced degree in library science. She’d moved to different parts of the country. She spent much of her career administering college libraries—first in Ohio, then South Dakota, then Florida. We kept up via holiday cards and occasional phone calls. In her 50’s, Beth had changed focus slightly and taken a post as director of a set of public libraries in an economically depressed part of lowland South Carolina. Beth had been in her new job only a year or so when the cancer hit. Her family and friends rallied to her support. Once her most intensive treatments were over, I went down for a weekend visit. We traded survivor stories. When she passed the five year mark without a recurrence, I sent hearty congratulations. Then, a couple of years later, a non-cancerous illness destroyed her kidneys and took her life with little warning. That April, I drove south through timber plantations, palmetto swamps, and railroad cuts festooned with blooming wisteria vines to get to South Carolina for Beth’s memorial service. I didn’t know much about her town, but suspected it would be as highly segregated racially as much of the South I’d previously been exposed to.

The small Methodist church was nearly full. Some of the mourners were family members I recognized, but I was surprised to see half a dozen older black women among the mostly white worshippers. I guessed at first that perhaps the women were maintenance workers at some of the libraries Beth supervised, then chided myself for stereotyping. At the reception after the service, I had a chance to talk with one of the women.

“How did you know Beth?” I asked.

“We were part of a local support group called ‘Bosom Buddies’,” the woman explained, pointing to the discrete pink lapel pin she wore.

I never learned much about the group. Beth may have had a hand in creating this cross-racial sisters-beneath-the-skin effort in the area she’d made her home. Whatever her role, she’d reached out across any racial divide, creating enough of a bond so that six women had taken the time to attend her memorial service.

Our country remains in need of healing. Pundits of many political leanings expound on all the ways we are polarized— economically, racially, politically, spiritually. Income disparities persist; wealth gaps have gotten worse. Gun violence takes too many lives; “stop and frisk” procedures and mass incarceration further divide us. Health outcomes vary tremendously, based partly on income and ethnicity. We’re still lop-sided. We all need healing. Perhaps those of us who are physically lop-sided can continue to build lop-sided bridges.

The Rich Man and Lazarus Revisited

Posted on September 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

The Rich Man and Lazarus Revisited —by Jinny Batterson

During my childhood, my most formally religious aunt used to give me books of Bible stories, adapted for children. One of the most difficult stories for me was Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It concerned death, not totally unknown even to small-town American children in the 1950’s, plus a kind of cosmic reckoning:

In a gated estate there lived a rich man, who (revised standard translation, part of Luke’s gospel, chapter 16) “was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.” Outside the rich man’s gate was a poor, diseased man named Lazarus, “who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table.” Sharing was apparently not part of the rich man’s ethos, so Lazarus languished in distress.

After a time, both Lazarus and the rich man died. Lazarus was carried by angels to heaven, “Abraham’s bosom,” a welcome change. The rich man, by contrast, went to Hades, a realm of fire and brimstone, just near enough to heaven so the rich man could see Lazarus there, hanging out with Abraham in comfort. The rich man cried out: “Father Abraham, have mercy upon me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.” Nothing doing, Abraham explained. The rich man had had his chance at comfort while alive. Now the chasm between his current locale and Lazarus was deep and impenetrable, allowing for no crossovers.

During the 1990’s, I was briefly exposed to a widening gap in perspectives between rich and not-so-rich. I had a short-term subcontract with a major accounting firm at their downtown office. At the time, I was living in an inner city neighborhood that suffered the side-effects of a worsening epidemic of crack cocaine: robberies, arrests, lengthy prison sentences, even murders. It was a scary time. Occasionally I went out to lunch with my accounting firm colleagues. Once, I asked my supervisor whether the city’s worsening poverty and crime bothered him.

“I don’t have to notice poverty or crime,” he responded. “After work, I ride the elevator down to the guarded basement garage to retrieve my car. Then I drive out the expressway to my home in a gated community in the suburbs. No poor people interact with me at all. It’s not my problem.” For most of the years since that encounter, I’ve lived in relative comfort, while trying with mixed success to learn and practice the discipline of sharing.

Though some quote an incident near the end of Jesus’ ministry as a justification for ignoring those in poverty, saying, without the surrounding context, “you always have the poor with you,” the vast majority of Jesus’ sayings and actions support the view that caring for “the least of these” is a sacred duty.

The year 2018 so far has been filled with more than a little fire and brimstone—volcanic eruptions on Hawaii’s big island, huge wildfires in much of the U.S. West. In the part of the country where I live, the major problem has been floods. So far, they have yet to approach Biblical proportions, but the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in eastern North Carolina has been severe enough so that our current equivalent of Noah’s Ark has deployed, in the form of government rescue boats and the “Cajun navy,” a set of volunteers with small boats who previously plied their crafts in last year’s major flooding in Houston, Texas. Florence drenched already struggling regions with over two feet of rain. Among the hardest hit were the region’s poor. Relieved to have been spared the worst of the storm, I watched media coverage of a flooded housing project where building maintenance had long been ignored or postponed. Videos showed some of the problems: peeling paint, exposed pipes, stained ceilings. Residents complained of asbestos-laced insulation. The electricity had gone out, and no one knew when it might be restored.

Beyond temporary aid, what could be done to help? Should we as a society put more emphasis on affordable housing, less on high-end real estate? Would rebuilding and/or relocating require higher taxes? Could we somehow craft a renewed ethic of sharing?

As I struggled to make sense of our society, seemingly rather badly out of kilter, I went out for a walk. The days were getting shorter. It occurred to me that our earth was in the period around an equinox—one of two occasions each year when the sun’s rays hit our tilted planet directly over the equator. Around the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, all creatures everywhere on earth experience days and nights of roughly equal length.

Instead of a chasm between wealth and poverty that gets harder and harder to cross, maybe we need something approaching a human “equinox.” Maybe we can head toward a narrower “wealth gap,” with adequate basic provisions for all living beings. Getting to a more equitable distribution and use of earth’s resources will take skill, political will, and good character. It IS possible, though. Nature creates equinoxes twice each year. Can we learn from her before flood, fire and brimstone get worse? Happy fall, y’all!