The Problem With Inequality Estimates

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I fully appreciate the concerns that people raise about how we estimate levels of employment among inmates or whether they would have voted if they could have is really a secondary point. We categorically exclude certain subgroups of the population from these surveys like the current population survey and many many others those are related to health, family formation just a wide range of surveys. As a sociologist I'm really interested in how we understand inequality and so you know it's as important to me to understand who's not working sort of thinking about everyone who's unemployed and not working not just those who are still looking for work.

Becky Pettit of the University of Washington and author of Invisible Men talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the growth of the prison population in the United States in recent decades. Pettit describes the magnitude of the increase particularly among demographic groups. She then discusses the implications of this increase for interpreting social statistics. Because the prison population isn't included in the main government surveys used by social scientists, data drawn from those surveys can be misleading as to what is actually happening among demographic groups, particularly the African-American population.