Commenting on the mobility/inequality link, Jim Manzi writes:
But what about all the other potential reasons, beyond what their Gini Coefficient was in 1985, for varying levels of social mobility between countries as diverse as Japan, France, and New Zealand?
The most obvious example is just the size of the countries. It’s at least plausible that much bigger […]
The New York Times writes:
Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.
Full article here.
Atleast part of the reason is a dwindling supply:
In tech circles, the C-suite at a publicly traded company is no longer the be-all and end-all. Just look at the troubles Yahoo! (YHOO) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) have recently had finding new leaders. HP canned former SAP (SAP) Chief Executive Officer Léo Apotheker after just 11 […]
NYU economist Mario Rizzo gives a list of some of the questions and issues that serious people ought to consider on inequality:
There seems to be very little concern, in the popular press, for the causes of unequal distribution. This includes, especially, the causes of the increasing unequal distribution over the past few decades. […]
“Here is a fact that you might not have heard from the Occupy Wall Street crowd: The incomes at the top of the income distribution have fallen substantially over the past few years. According to the most recent IRS data, between 2007 and 2009, the 99th percentile income (AGI, not inflation-adjusted) fell from $410,096 to […]
Economist Russ Roberts writes:
The death of Steve Jobs is a useful reminder of the fact that much wealth is not winner-take-all but winner makes everybody better off. Steve Jobs’s estate is estimated to be something between $6 billion and $7 billion. About 2/3 of that is Disney stock he received when Disney […]
“I have an even better argument against tax cuts for the rich. According to Bernstein’s logic, they don’t even work for the rich. If you look at the mean income for the top 20% of all families, it also shrinks between 1989 and 1992, grows between 1992 and 2000 and falls between 2000 […]
“Indeed, the share of top incomes coming from capital is much lower now than it has been historically. According to Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, for the richest Americans — those in the top 0.01 percent of the distribution — the percentage of income […]
Lefties often label the era from the late 1970’s to today as the era of deregulation where wages stagnated, income inequality increased, and overall the rich got richer at the expense of the poor. They argue that we should go back to the economic era from roughly the end of WWII, to the late 1970’s. […]
The Freakonomics blog has an interesting perspective:
From a pair of Harvard economists, Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn, and a UCLA business school professor, Paola Giuliano, comes this working paper (Abstract here and below; full version here) that tests the hypothesis that current gender role differences can be traced to shifting methods of agriculture, […]
Most of you are probably familiar with the GDP vs Median income graphs showing that since around the 1970’s, GDP has been growing faster than median income. This has lead to various theories as to why this is the case. Common explanations range from technology change, higher premiums for education, globalization, to the conspiracy Brenton […]
Dean Baker, in the March issue of the American Prospect (Yes, I am about 3 months behind in my magazine reading - I’ve been busy!) wrote something that surprised me:
In a recent paper, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that by far, the largest single factor contributing to the growth of […]
Last months issue of the Atlantic had a fascinating article on the global elites, here are some snippets I found interesting:
From a global perspective, the impact of these developments has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly in the poorer parts of the world. Take India and China, for example: between 1820 and 1950, nearly a […]
“The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population, for example, makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest — extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding.” — Catherine […]
George Mason University economics professor explains:
Along the horizontal axis are within-country income percentiles running from the bottom 5% (1st ventile) to the top 5% (20th ventile). Along the vertical axis are world income percentiles.
The graph shows that the bottom 5% of Brazilians are among the poorest people in the world but the top 5% are […]
My good friend Jon asked an important question: why not prefer the European economic model vs the United States economic model? I didn’t want to bog down his comments section with a long response, so I thought I’d post my longer response here.
Basically, there are two paradigms, two “visions” of an economy. The first, is […]
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