James K. Boyce is a senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the author of Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change.
James Boyce
- Leader of Air Quality Co-Benefits in Climate Policy
- Member of Political Economy of Distribution
By this expert
Carbon Dividends: The Bipartisan Key to Climate Policy?
The practical question in Washington today is not whether regulations will go, but whether anything will replace them
Let Them Drink Pollution?
The tragic crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents have been poisoned by lead contamination, is not just about drinking water. And it’s not just about Flint. It’s about race and class, and the stark contradiction between the American dream of equal rights and opportunity for all and the American nightmare of metastasizing inequality of wealth and power.
Three Measures of Environmental Inequality
Using data on industrial air pollution exposure in the United States, we compute three measures of environmental inequality: the Gini coefficient of exposure, the ratio of median exposure of minorities to that of non-Hispanic whites, and the ratio of median exposure of poor households to that of nonpoor households.