Access to Paid Leave: An Overlooked Aspect of Economic and Social Inequality

Rising economic inequality is a growing concern for many Americans. The widening gap between those at the top and bottom of the income scale is pushing decision makers to consider policy solutions that can begin to address these inequities. Wages are often the focal point in debates about income inequality. Often overlooked, however, is a key aspect of compensation - paid leave. Lack of paid leave, which is concentrated among low-wage jobs, exacerbates the inequalities that come with the wage gap. For those at the bottom, this further contributes to economic instability because lack of paid leave frequently leads to lost wages and job loss. In fact, one in seven workers reports having lost a job to recover from illness or care for a family member

Rational motivic path spaces and Kim's relative unipotent section conjecture

We initiate a study of path spaces in the nascent context of "motivic dga's", under development in doctoral work by Gabriella Guzman. This enables us to reconstruct the unipotent fundamental group of a pointed scheme from the associated augmented motivic dga, and provides us with a factorization of Kim's relative unipotent section conjecture into several smaller conjectures with a homotopical flavor. Based on a conversation with Joseph Ayoub, we prove that the path spaces of the punctured projective line over a number field are concentrated in degree zero with respect to Levine's t-structure for mixed Tate motives. This constitutes a step in the direction of Kim's conjecture.Comment: Minor corrections, details added, and major improvements to exposition throughout. 52 page