For too long, the wealthy and powerful have used the cycle of economic and political power to enrich themselves and entrench their control. In this piece, Dēmos president Taifa Smith Butler envisions ...

Social scientists use 3 common methods to define class—by occupation, income, or education—and there is really no consensus about the “right” way to do it. Michael Zweig, a leading scholar in ...

How past racial injustices are carried forward as wealth handed down across generations and reinforced by “color-blind” practices and policies Issues of racial inequity are increasingly at the ...

This analysis shows the policy approaches most likely to reduce inequities in wealth by race, as opposed to exacerbating existing inequities. The dramatic increase in wealth inequality over the past ...

Over the last ten years, a growing number of cities and states passed laws limiting the use of credit checks in hiring, promotion, and firing. Lawmakers are motivated by a number of well-founded ...

The freedom to vote is America’s most important political right outside of the original Bill of Rights, and it is also the most hard-won right. In the early years of our republic, only white ...

The City of Detroit’s bankruptcy was driven by a severe decline in revenues (and, importantly, not an increase in obligations to fund pensions). Depopulation and long-term unemployment caused ...

MYTH: Expansion will undermine the Court’s legitimacy and politicize the institution. Public trust in the U.S. Supreme Court is already deeply undermined. More than 2 decades of divisive decisions ...

Big companies are using data to preserve the power imbalance that keeps them rich. This economic model is rooted in chattel slavery and relies on the extraction and commodification of data. At its ...

Campaign finance laws protect our democracy from corruption and preserve the integrity of our elections. These rules governing the use of money in politics were in a sorry state before Citizens United ...

With more than 15 million workers in the sector, and leverage over workplace standards across the supply chain, retail wields enormous influence on Americans’ standard of living and the nation’s ...

The shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri brought to light a set of racial injustices in the lived daily experiences of the city’s African American residents.1 Attempts to understand ...