About This Platform

Equally Poor was created by Seth C. Oranburg, a legal scholar whose work sits at the intersection of law, economics, and empirical research. The platform reflects a conviction that the data on American inequality — scattered across government agencies, academic datasets, and research archives — needed to be brought together in one place, presented with full methodological transparency, and mapped against the legal history that shaped it.

Building Equally Poor required assembling and harmonizing data from multiple independent sources spanning more than a century: the Piketty-Saez top income share series from the World Inequality Database, Gini coefficients and poverty rates from the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, economic indicators from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), and detailed microdata from the American Community Survey. Each source uses different methodologies, covers different time periods, and measures different aspects of inequality and poverty. The power of this platform lies in bringing them together — making it possible to see, in a single interactive view, how income concentration, distributional inequality, and poverty have moved together (and apart) in response to legal and policy changes.

The platform is independent — unaffiliated with any political party, advocacy organization, or government agency. It is maintained as a scholarly resource and is free to use for research and educational purposes.

Poverty and inequality are often discussed as though they were the same thing. They are not. Poverty measures whether individuals or families fall below a threshold of material adequacy — it is an absolute concept. Inequality measures how income or wealth is distributed across the entire population — it is a relative concept. A legal intervention can reduce one without affecting the other, or even move them in opposite directions. This platform presents both together precisely because their divergences are as informative as their convergences.

Consider the historical record. During the 1980s and 1990s, the official poverty rate declined modestly even as the Gini coefficient and top income shares rose sharply. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 concentrated pre-tax income at the top while economic growth reduced the poverty headcount. The Earned Income Tax Credit — expanded significantly in 1990 and 1993 — is perhaps the clearest example of this divergence: it lifts millions of families above the poverty line each year yet has essentially no effect on top income shares or the Gini coefficient. Conversely, a progressive estate tax might compress wealth concentration at the top while doing nothing for families at the bottom. Legal scholars who describe a policy as “reducing inequality” without specifying which measure they mean are making an imprecise claim. This platform makes the distinction visible.

The historical periods overlaid on the charts add a further dimension. Economic history reveals recurring cycles in the social tolerance for inequality. The Gilded Age (1870–1900) produced wealth concentration that triggered the Progressive Era's antitrust laws, income taxation, and labor protections. The postwar Golden Age (1947–1973) combined strong union density, highly progressive taxation, the GI Bill, and tight labor markets to achieve something historically rare: simultaneously low poverty andcompressed inequality. That alignment unraveled after 1980 as top tax rates fell, union membership declined, financial deregulation concentrated returns to capital, and trade liberalization shifted the wage distribution. Branko Milanovic has described these as “Kuznets waves” — recurring cycles of compression and divergence shaped by political and legal choices.

There is a genuine analytical tension here that this platform does not attempt to resolve. Some degree of income inequality may reflect productive incentives — returns to entrepreneurial risk-taking, to innovation, to the deployment of capital in its most productive uses. The complete elimination of inequality, as attempted in command economies, removes the price signals and incentive structures on which market economies depend. At the same time, extreme concentration generates its own pathologies: it distorts political institutions, restricts intergenerational mobility, and — as the historical record suggests — eventually produces the political instability that demands legal correction. Where the balance lies is a normative question that this platform does not answer. What it does is present the empirical record clearly enough that legal scholars, economists, and policymakers can engage that question with precision rather than with slogans.

Equally Poor was built on a conviction that understanding the relationship between law and economic distribution requires something that neither legal scholarship nor economics alone typically provides: a single, carefully sourced, methodologically honest platform that places the best available long-run data on both poverty and inequality alongside the legal history that shaped them. Tax lawyers advising clients on estate planning, labor economists studying the minimum wage, sociologists analyzing poverty trends, and constitutional scholars debating the scope of Congress's taxing power are all reasoning, implicitly or explicitly, about the same underlying empirical reality. That reality deserves to be visualized clearly, with the right distinctions drawn, and cited accurately.

The platform takes no position on what the appropriate level of inequality or poverty is — those are questions for democratic deliberation informed by values that data alone cannot supply. It does insist on two things: methodological honesty and terminological precision. Each series displayed here has known limitations, documented series breaks, and contested interpretations. The pre-1959 poverty estimates are labeled unofficial because they are; the income-timing artifacts in the Piketty-Saez series are explained because they matter for interpretation; the Auten-Splinter critique is acknowledged because it represents a serious scholarly challenge. And when a legal intervention “reduces inequality,” this platform shows which inequality — and whether poverty moved with it, against it, or not at all. The goal is to give researchers and practitioners the full picture, including the uncertainties, so they can reason from evidence rather than from uncritical acceptance of headline numbers.

• 01
  Tax Law & Income DistributionHow does the legal structure of taxation — marginal rate schedules, capital gains treatment, estate taxation, corporate taxation, and the earned income tax credit — affect the pre-tax and post-tax distribution of income? What can the historical record tell us about the distributional effects of specific rate changes?
• 02
  Welfare Legislation & PovertyWhat has been the measurable effect of major welfare legislation — the Social Security Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, Medicare and Medicaid, welfare reform, the Affordable Care Act, and the American Rescue Plan — on official and supplemental poverty rates? How do measurement choices (OPM vs. SPM) affect the answer?
• 03
  Inequality & Access to LawHow does economic inequality affect access to legal institutions — to courts, to legal counsel, to administrative processes? Does rising inequality undermine the formal equality of legal rights by making those rights practically inaccessible to those without resources?
• 04
  Labor Law & Wage CompressionWhat role has the erosion of labor law — declining union density, stagnant minimum wages, expansion of at-will employment, preemption of local wage ordinances — played in the rise of wage inequality since the 1970s? What does the international comparative evidence suggest about the counterfactual?
• 05
  Historical Data & Law-and-Economics MethodologyWhat can more than a century of distributional data reveal about the relationship between legal change and economic outcomes? What methodological tools — difference-in-differences, synthetic control, regression discontinuity — are needed to move from the correlations displayed here to causal inference?
• 06
  Constitutional Structure & DistributionHow has constitutional doctrine — on the scope of the taxing power, the commerce clause, the equal protection guarantee, and property rights — constrained or enabled the legal tools available for redistribution? What does the Lochner era reveal about the relationship between constitutional interpretation and distributional outcomes?

Every data series displayed on this platform is sourced from peer-reviewed research or official government statistics. Primary citations are provided for each series on the Methodologypage. Where data quality is contested or series are unofficial, this is prominently disclosed — including on the charts themselves. The pre-1959 poverty estimates are marked “unofficial” wherever they appear; income-timing artifacts in the top income share series are explained in the methodology documentation; Census series breaks are documented and their potential magnitude noted.

This commitment to source transparency is not merely an academic convention. For lawyers and policymakers reasoning from data about what law has done and what law can do, the difference between a genuine trend and a measurement artifact, or between a pre-tax and a post-tax series, is material. Getting these distinctions right is a prerequisite for sound legal reasoning about distribution.