The pandemic of 2020 has reignited a national conversation about inequality, having laid bare the chasm in health and well-being that groups of different racial, ethnic, geographic, or economic backgrounds experience over their lives. When COVID-19 subsides, policymakers in the Biden-Harris administration and members of the new Congress will be faced with decisions about the high levels of inequality and low levels of mobility into the middle class that make it hard for people to attain their ambitions and, in doing so, threaten the economy and our political and social fabric. The good news is that public and philanthropic investments have built a foundation of evidence that can inform each stage of the decision process.

Descriptive information from a wide range of national surveys of income, earnings, and wealth enable us to define and understand inequality from different perspectives. Social scientists have laid out the disparities in educational and economic opportunity linked to a child’s place of birth as well as her family’s racial, ethnic, and economic characteristics. Researchers have also shown how states’ per-pupil spending is linked to school completion and adult wages, especially for children in lower-income families. And a very different type of evidence — qualitative interviews with Latino students about their campus experiences, or with participants in subsidized jobs programs — can ensure that decisions to redesign public programs are directly informed by people’s lived experiences.

Read the full article about building economic mobility and reducing inequality by Virginia Knox at MDRC.