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We address three basic issues regarding the long-term dynamics of inequality in society. First, we consider the interpretation of residence sizes in socioeconomic terms by comparing statistical patterns extracted from the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) Project database with those from the 21st-century United States. Second, we examine the degree to which the size and productivity of human networks is systematically related to inequality. Finally, we investigate relationships between productivity and productivity growth distributions for patterns of inequality and development across preindustrial societies. We find that across preindustrial societies residence size distributions provide a reasonable proxy for the distribution of productivity (income, a flow of physical and social resources to the group) and a minimum estimator for the distribution of wealth (a stock of such resources accumulated over time); that scale and productivity affect levels of inequality but account for only a small fraction of the observed variance across societies; and that inequality growth is independent of productivity growth, on average and over time. These findings have important implications for efforts to promote more equitable economic development in the present. 

Abstract Rural America is often depicted as a distressed and left‐behind place, with limited opportunities for the children growing up there. This paper addresses this topic by examining the dynamics of rural places over the past four decades and how these changes impact the economic mobility of children raised in poor rural households. Employing a place‐based framework, we utilise sequence analysis to identify dominant trajectories of change for more than 8000 rural communities. Our analysis reveals highly diverse community trajectories that connect deindustrialisation and racial inequality to elevated and rising poverty rates in certain places, while also documenting more favourable poverty trends elsewhere. These diverging local outcomes shed new light on the conflicting narratives surrounding rural America. We then demonstrate that, among children from poorer households, exposure to community poverty is predictive of adult economic mobility, patterns which are partly mediated by family stability and child poverty. Our finding that poorchildrenface additional disadvantages when they also grow up in poorplacessuggests a potential role for place‐based policies and redistribution to help ameliorate these disparities. 

Abstract Understanding changes in the built environment is vital for sustainable urban development and disaster preparedness. Recent years have seen the emergence of a variety of global, continent-level, and nation-wide datasets related to the current state and the evolution of the built environment, human settlements or building stocks. However, such datasets may face limitations like incomplete coverage, sparse building information, coarse resolution, and limited timeframes. This study addresses these challenges by integrating three spatial datasets to create an extensive, attribute-rich sequence of settlement layers spanning 200 years for the contiguous U.S. This integration process involves complex data processing, merging property-level real estate, parcel, and remote sensing-based building footprint data, and creating gridded multi-temporal settlement layers. This effort unveils the latest edition (Version 2) of the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the U.S. (HISDAC-US), which includes the latest land use and structural information as of the year 2021. It enables detailed research on urban form and structure, helps assess and map the built environment’s risk to natural hazards, assists in population modeling, supports land use analysis, and aids health studies. 

Abstract Multiple aspects of our society are reflected in how we have transformed land through time. However, limited availability of historical-spatial data at fine granularity have hindered our ability to advance our understanding of the ways in which land was developed over the long-term. Using a proprietary, national housing and property database, which is a result of large-scale, industry-fuelled data harmonization efforts, we created publicly available sequences of gridded surfaces that describe built land use progression in the conterminous United States at fine spatial (i.e., 250 m × 250 m) and temporal resolution (i.e., 1 year - 5 years) between the years 1940 and 2015. There are six land use classes represented in the data product: agricultural, commercial, industrial, residential-owned, residential-income, and recreational facilities, as well as complimentary uncertainty layers informing the users about quantifiable components of data uncertainty. The datasets are part of the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the U.S. (HISDAC-US) and enable the creation of new knowledge of long-term land use dynamics, opening novel avenues of inquiry across multiple fields of study.