Nick Galasso is a research and policy advisor on inequality and economic growth at Oxfam America.

Here are the facts:

Income inequality in the US continues to worsen. While earners at the very top claim greater shares of the country’s income distribution, shares among the rest are shrinking.

A recent analysis by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston suggests incomes for the bottom 90% only grew by $59 between 1966 and 2011 (inflation adjusted). Over the same period, average incomes for the top 10% rose by $116,071. The top 1% saw their share grow by $628,817. And the top 1% of the 1%? They saw their share grow by $18,362,740.

Here’s a visual courtesy of Johnston: If a $59 boost is equivalent to an inch, then the incomes of the top 10% grew by 168 FEET! The top 1% grew by 884 feet, and the cream of the crop – the top 1% of the 1% – saw an increase of 4.9 miles (that’s 310,464 feet). I attempted to plot these distances on the graph below. However, it’s largely unreadable because the cream of the crop dwarfs even the 1% as a whole. (If you look close though, you can sort of see the other distributions.)

And this trend is becoming worse.

Despite the fifth year of post-financial crisis recovery, inequality is growing. The first two months of 2013 saw median incomes drop by 1.1%, to $51,404, moving it 5.6% below where it was in June 2009 (from $54,437 at the start of the recovery). Since 2000, Americans have seen the median income drop nearly 9%.

At the other side of the income spectrum, a different story has unfolded. Since 2009, while the bottom 90% saw their incomes shrink, the top 10% of earners took a whopping 149% of the post-recovery growth! How is that possible, you ask? Because the incomes of the bottom 90% shrank. The top 1% captured 81% of the gains, of which more than half went to the top 1/10 of the 1%, and 39% of the gains to the top 1% of the 1%.

“Ponder that last fact for a moment,” says Johnston. “The top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, those making at least $7.97 million in 2011, enjoyed 39 percent of all the income gains in America. In a nation of 158.4 million households, just 15,837 of them received 39 cents out of every dollar of increased income.”

We’ve got more questions than answers.

The dangers of growing income inequality are now widely recognized. Yet, there’s little dialogue regarding how to reverse the tide, especially in the US.

At issue is a fundamental question:

How do we recast the American economy so that it generates broad-based growth, as opposed to merely great growth at the very top, and flat (or even regressive) growth for everyone else?

Oxfam is still trying to identify the best policy solutions to help curb inequality in the US, and we’re interested what our allies, adversaries, and the blogosphere have to say about the following possibilities:

1)      Target the wealthy. Make corporations and rich people pay their fair share.

2)      Gain greater access to social services for the very poor.

3)      Strengthen organized labor.

4)      Raise the minimum wage.

5)      Improve education.

6)      Clean up America’s legislative and regulatory bodies, which are too corrupted by wealth.

7)      Focus on creating more incentives for an environment of inclusive growth.

I offer these to stimulate thinking, not as a be-all-end-all list. So what’s missing? Which of these or other policy responses may prove best to reverse the US’s growing inequality? We want to hear from you!

Policy-makers put a lot of faith in education as a pathway toward prosperity—for individuals, for families, and even for entire countries. And for many, education offers the possibility of economic mobility and, perhaps equality of opportunity.

For Oxfam building human capital through education is not just good for society and families, but should be considered as something closer to a human right.

'Numbers and letters' class (pre-primary) at N. V. Massaquoi School, West Point, Monrovia, Liberia. Aubrey Wade/Oxfam GB

This case is easier to make—and more salient—for primary and secondary education. For more advanced education, a careful analysis is worthwhile to make sure the value to individuals, families, and societies is worth it. In general, the presumed answer is yes. But, as the costs of getting a college education rise, the question increasingly gets asked and doubts creep in about whether it’s worth it.

I came across a report released earlier this year on “the economic case for higher education” in the USA produced by the US Departments of Treasury and the US Department of Education.  Those are formidable authors, so I thought it would be an impressive document. And it is.

The paper finds that college tuition has increased rapidly since 1991. This is offset a bit by increased financial aid (from various sources) and government tax breaks. But even taking these into account, college tuition has increased by 58 percent since 1991 for public schools and 25 percent for private schools. Public schools educate the large majority of students, so rising public school costs affect more people. Rising costs in public schools reflect the relentless budget cutting happening in the states, as well as increasing costs and administration of those schools.

Despite increasing cost, college education has a high return-on-investment. Incomes for people who have college education are 64 percent higher than for those who do not. And people with college education often receive other benefits, like pensions, health insurance, paid time off. And they are employed more, or rather, experience less unemployment.

In general, the wage premium for going to college has accelerated since the early 1980s. This might imply a shortage of college-educated people for the labor force, but it also reflects the stagnation of wages for non-college educated people.

For individuals and families, it’s clear that college is a good bet. Individuals that start life in a poor family (in the lowest income quartile), but who get a college education, reduce the chance that they will also be poor by more than half.

But the positive story of college education and prosperity begins to fray with this graph:

Here we see that college is still a distant dream for the overwhelming majority of poor Americans (bottom or first quartile on the left).  Less than one-third starts college, and less than one-tenth graduate. Compared to people in families with more money, poorer kids enroll at much lower rates, and once they enroll have a much harder time graduating. While the trend has been upward for poor people over three decades of college enrollment and graduation, the improvement has been for every income level, not just poor families (the orange v. blue bars). In fact, the improvements have been faster for higher income levels—with the rate of  improvement in college entry and graduation highest for kids in families in the third quartile.

Despite increasing cost, college education has a high return-on-investment. But it is still a distant dream for the majority of poor Americans. Photo: Nikki Eads/Oxfam America.

So richer kids have an easier time getting to college, more success sticking with it, and get higher incomes as a result. Things have been getting better for them over the years.

A college education is a great opportunity and is an engine for class mobility. It could be an engine for increased equality. But is an engine that is unavailable to kids from the lowest class really an engine of opportunity at all? If college delivers higher income to graduates, but is denied to poorer families, then does it actually help transmit increased inequality?

Today’s guest blog is written by Shannon Scribner, Humanitarian Policy Manager

Last week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a report on aid to Afghanistan. One major finding of the report was no surprise – nation-building programs in Afghanistan are not all sustainable. As the handover of security responsibility to the Afghan government approaches, there is even more political pressure on the United States and all donor countries to produce results on the ground. This focus on “quick impact” has led to a majority of aid being channeled through military actors to “win hearts and minds”, while civilian-led efforts to address the underlying causes of poverty and repair the destruction caused by 30 years of war have been sidelined.

Too many development programs are based on this notion that aid can be used to win the hearts and minds of the people. But this approach is at odds with accepted principles of sustainable development: aid should be based on need and implemented by aid professionals alongside the community. Instead, it is based on the assumption that by giving Afghans roads, bridges and cash, including paying off local leaders, they will denounce the Taliban and other armed groups and embrace a government and international forces that have not been able to protect them and in some cases have done them harm.

This gender equity, education, and food security project was funded by Oxfam America and implemented by an Oxfam partner (DACAR) in Shamali (north Kabul). Photo by Mohammed Salim/Oxfam

I’ll never forget what an Oxfam staff member, who had been living in Afghanistan for several years, said to me about the role of the military: “Afghans get that international forces are there to go after the Taliban but they don’t understand why military forces involve themselves in community development projects and affairs. They don’t understand it, so they don’t trust it.” Without trust, you don’t have the commitment needed for sustainable reconstruction projects.

The Obama administration’s decision to focus development efforts in the war zones in the south and east of the country where they are trying to win hearts and minds has never made sense for successful development. To pump billions of dollars into areas where intense fighting is taking place and then expect projects to succeed goes against logic. Where fighting is the most intense, projects need to be smaller, cost less, take more time, and require community involvement at every step. The focus on the south and east also means that more secure parts of the country where conditions are more conducive to sustainable development projects receive less aid – a situation which, understandably, angers many Afghans. For example, in central Afghanistan, Daikundi is one of the poorest provinces in the country, but often is overlooked. Less than one percent of schools have buildings and there are no paved roads.

To further hinder the sustainability of programs in insecure areas, even when military forces aren’t directly involved, they rely on local contracting companies with limited capacities and weak links to the communities. They are widely viewed as wasteful, ineffective, and even corrupt. As one tribal leader in Paktia said to Oxfam staff, “We have a common saying – it is better to have less from a sustainable source than have a great deal just once…we really do not need somebody to distribute biscuits to us and do not need construction projects that fall down after a year.”

The real success stories in Afghanistan are the Back to School campaign that increased school enrollment of children from 900,000 under the Taliban to 6.7 million today. In particular, there are now 2.4 million girls in school – when in 2001 there were just a few thousand. Healthcare too has improved for many Afghans thanks to the Basic Package of Health Services managed by the Ministry of Public Health that ensures basic community-level health services are available and integrated into a national structure of healthcare provision. The focus here wasn’t to win over the people but to educate Afghan children and improve people’s health. Much progress has been made, but we still have a long way to go.

Looking at these failures and successes as well as the results of the Senate report, it is clear that the $3.2 billion the Obama administration has requested for Afghanistan reconstruction projects in the coming fiscal year should address alleviating poverty and improving education and healthcare. In a country where life expectancy is only 45 years of age, development needs are immense. Therefore, let’s not focus our efforts on quick results, but where we know we will have impact and where we know there is real need. For Afghans, success has nothing to do with winning their hearts and minds. Success means that they are able to feed their families, send their daughters to school, take their child to the health clinic when they are sick, and secure a future for their families.