Bloomberg News ranks America’s most unequal big cities.
Using the Gini coefficient, the most common statistical measure of income inequality, the news agency ranked American cities with populations of at least 250,000.
Reporting the findings, Bloomberg reporters Victoria Stilwell and Wei Lu define inequality as what “happens when there's a concentration of people at the highest and lowest ends of the income spectrum without much middle-ground in between.”
The list includes big-time cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Boston, but not Chicago, and touches many regions of the country. According to the Bloomberg ranking, the most unequal American big cities are:
1) New Orleans
2) Atlanta
3) Cincinnati
4) Boston
5) Dallas
6) New York
7) Miami
8) Tampa
9) Los Angeles
10) Houston
According to the Bloomberg report, “The U.S. as a whole has become a more unequal country in the last five years, with its Gini index climbing to 0.48 last year from 0.469 in 2009.”
In 2014, Pope Francis called inequality “the root of social evil.”
