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“More unequal than Zimbabwe.”
01-Nov-11A piece on Bridgeport, Fairfield, and Darien, in Connecticut, home to more than a million people, where the income inequality index would make it the twelfth most unequal country in the world – worse than Zimbabwe, worse than Russia, worse than Mexico, worse than Rwanda or Madagascar.
As a New Yorker you grow up with this: the checkerboard pattern of New Jersey and Connecticut, with their blighted and weird urban areas cheek-by-jowl with unfathomably wealthy suburbs. Our normal pattern is to know nothing whatever about it: we might go off to Rwanda to deal with their social problems – which is cool – but to care at all for what is happening in Newark or Bridgeport or Trenton or Paterson is almost unheard-of in the overeducated set.