By Eric Chemi and Joshua Green
May 20, 2014
This month, Bloomberg Rankings dove into U.S. census data to measure the level of economic equality in each of 435 congressional districts—a useful endeavor, given all the recent political attention on inequality. The Rankings team did this by calculating the Gini coefficient, a formula that measures the distribution of income across a population. The closer a Gini number is to 1, the greater the level of inequality; the closer to zero, the closer to perfect equality. You can see the Bloomberg rankings here. The big take-away: A strikingly high level of inequality exists throughout the United States.