Attachment has been reformatted so links can be accessed on this page. Dr. Lynch's submission follows:

“A Place to Start: Radical Criminology and Empirical Data on the Web”

In my view, you can’t be a radical/critical criminologists without using data. Why?

Because many of the central ideas radical criminologists use in their discussions -- especially those related to inequality in income, wealth and power – must be illustrated using data in order to be persuasive, especially to students who have been raised in a cultural environment that rejects inequality as an imaginary creation of liberals and left wing academics. To be sure, the majority of the students to whom you lectures, the people in your local community – and perhaps even the majority of your colleagues – believe in the reverse myth: that hard work gets you ahead, and those who work hard succeed economically. This myths helps people who succeed feel pride in their achievements. They can believe that they have succeeded because they worked hard – whether or not this is true [24]. Because they have worked hard, they can ignore the fact that they were born into specific conditions that contained access to opportunities for success, opportunities denied to others from lower socio-economic positions, or different racial, ethnic or gender group membership. The myth continues that those in the lower class occupy “unsuccessful” (disadvantageous) positions because they don’t work hard, or because they are under-achievers and undeserving of success. What kind of data can be used to demonstrate the inaccuracies of these ideas?

Following the logic of the hard work ideology, today’s CEO must work much harder than those who labor for them – the workers -- and much harder than CEOs did forty years ago [1]. In 2000, the average CEO salary (for international comparison between US and British CEO salaries see 29) was more than 500 times the average worker’s salary (for further data see 31). In 1960, the average CEO earned only 40 times more than the average worker. For a variety of reasons other than hard work, CEO salaries increased at a much faster rate then corporate profits, while worker salaries barely kept pace with the rate of inflation [30]. At the same time that worker salaries remained relatively constant, workers were working more and harder, indicated, for example, by the upward trends in worker productivity data [22, 23]. The economic disparity between workers and CEOs can be seen on an even broader scale – it is also evident in the growth of income between income quintiles [2]. From 1979 to 2001, the income of the top quintile grew by 53%, while the income for the lowest quintile expanded by only 3 percent.

A significant portion of those who live in the lowest quintile live in poverty [3, 6]. Nearly 13 percent of Americans, approximately 37 million people, live in poverty. More than one-third of these people (13 million) are children. Poverty rates vary by race and ethnicity [3, 10], and are associated with both race-and ethnic linked differences in income and wealth [11, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 27]. Trends in income, wealth and poverty data illustrate an expansion in between class and race disparities in inequality especially since the middle of the last century [2, 4, 5, 8, 16, 22].

These and many other assertions central to radical criminology can be easily demonstrated using the data from the sources listed below.

1. United for a Fair Economy - Ceo and Worker Pay Charts, 1990-2003

2. Income Inequality Tables - Family Incomes Grouped, 1947-1979 and 1979-2001 show divergent trends in income inequality.

3. Various Income Facts - Facts on poverty, wealth, taxes, wages, government budgets, and globalization provided by the Archdioceses of St. Paul and Minneapolis Office of Social Justice.

4. Income Inequality, US, 1913-1988 - Summary of research by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

5. Income Inequality Charts, 1967-2001

6. Poverty, Income Statistics - From InfoPlease. Data on nearly two dozen poverty and income measures.

7. Earnings, Income and Wealth - Research paper examining the relationship between earnings, income and wealth.

8. Review of Wealth and Income - Link to the journal, The Review of Wealth and Income, sponsored by the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth. Readers can access articles from 1951-2001 for free.

9. Two Americas - Article on income inequality by the Heritage Foundation.

10. Racial Wealth Divide - Studies and data by the Racial Wealth Divide Project.

11. Wealth and Asset Ownership - Data from the US Census Bureau on wealth and assets.

12. Wealth and Income Distributions - Comparative data from the Global Policy Forum.

13. Wealth Charts, US - Various wealth charts from United for a Fair Economy.

14. Wealth Inequality - Study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

15. Wealth of Nations Report - 200+ page report from the World Bank.

16. Historical Poverty Tables - US Bureau of Census, tables measuring various dimensions of poverty, some dating to 1959.

17. Family Income by Race - Mean and median family income for white, black and Hispanic households, 1947-2003.

18. Race and Money - Article on race and money by the Left Business Observer.

19. Race and Wealth - Interesting analysis and policy paper written by the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee called “A Nation of Owners and Savers” (Hint: Know the enemy).

20. Black-White Wealth Gap - Article from The Nation.

21. Economics Data Collection - Links to a few dozen sources for economic data.

22. Economic Time Series Data - A mother-load of time-series data from Economagic. Data series are dynamic, and can be used to generate downloadable charts and graphs. Higher level access available by subscription.

23. Income and Productivity Trends, US and Canada

24. Dynamic Income Mobility Chart - Click on the color coded income groups to track their movement across income quintiles between 1988 and 1998.

25. Income Inequality and Health - National Bureau of Economic Research summary of the relationship between income inequality and health access.

26. Historic Income Inequality Tables - Clickable tables provided by the US Census Bureau.

27. Household Income by Race - Percentage distribution by Household Income Groupings for whites, blacks and Hispanics, national average, 1972, 1985, 2000, and 2001.

28. Fedstat Map - Click on this map for various Census data by state.

29. US-UK CEO Salaries - Paper comparing US-UK CEO salary differences.

30. CEO Salaries rise while middle Class incomes shrink - Discussion by the Service Employees International Union

31. AFL-CIO CEO Paywatch - AFL-CIO discussions and data examining executive compensation