Chapter 12: Income Distribution, Poverty, and Discrimination

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The steps to achieve the learning objectives include reading sections from your textbook and the
causation chain game, which is available directly on the Tucker web site. The steps also include
references to Ask the Instructor Video Clips, the Graphing Workshop available through
CourseMate on the Tucker website.
#1 - Explain how economists measure income distribution.
Step 1

Read the sections in your textbook titled The Distribution of Income and
International Comparisons of Income Distribution.

Step 2

Listen to the Ask the Instructor Video Clip titled Should You Have Gone to College?
You will learn reasons that people with higher education earn more.

Step 3

Listen to the Ask the Instructor Video Clip titled How Does Income Distribution in
the U.S. Compare? You will learn how to measure income distribution and how it
compares to other countries.

The Result

Following these steps, you have learned how income is distributed in the United States
and how to interpret a Lorenz Curve.

#2 - Identify poverty, who are the poor, antipoverty programs, and welfare reform proposals.
Step 1

Read the sections in your textbook titled Poverty, Antipoverty Programs, and
Reform Proposals.

Step 2

Listen to the Ask the Instructor Video Clip titled Will There Always Be Poverty?
You will learn how the poverty line is computed and criticisms of this computation.

The Result

Following these steps, you have learned the trend of poverty rates in the United States
and the characteristics of persons and families below the poverty level. And you have
learned criticisms of welfare and programs to reform welfare, such as workfare and the
negative income tax.

#3 - Describe the economic consequences of discrimination and the comparable worth controversy.
Step 1

Read the section in your textbook titled Discrimination. .

The Result

Following these steps, you have learned that under discrimination the labor demand and
labor supply curves for workers with the same performance create different equilibrium
wage rates. Comparable worth is a nonmarket wage-setting process using point scores to
establish relative wage rates for different jobs.

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