Income Distribution and Poverty in Nevada

In his famous visit to the U.S. early in the nineteenth century, the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville was surprised by what he saw as “an equality of condition” in his travels around the country. Although he commented on the existence of wealth in the new nation, he was impressed by what he saw as its relative lack of concentration (de Tocqueville 1969). Recent studies by social historians, however, discovered that de Tocqueville was mistaken. Further research suggests that a pattern of highly unequal distributions of wealth and income persisted from the time of the Revolution up through the end of the Civil War, peaking during the period from 1850 to 1870 (Sturm 1977). In subsequent years, patterns of income and wealth inequality fluctuated only slightly until the late 1970’s, when the income disparity began to rise again, with the gap growing ever since (Keister and Moller 2000; Hurst 2004).