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No it isn't. Lot's of empty talk here but any income gap is caused by the fact that some work more hours, get more education, and stay on the job longer than others. We're seeing a cultural divide that's increasing....The income gap is widening because of inflation and taxes...
Actually, no. Foreign currencies have been devaluing more than the dollar and US inflation's been a no-show.The US Dollar is worth less...
Income inequality and the education of Jonathan Chait « The Enterprise Blog
snippet:
1. Research by Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon, generally a liberal fave, finds that not only has the increase of inequality been exaggerated, but it has ceased. The excess growth of mean relative to median income reversed itself after 2000. But maybe he is somehow saying just the opposite, that it has actually not ceased. Weird, that.
2. And Gordonwho, in all fairness, does think incomes are more unequal today than a generation agohas this to say about supposedly stagnant middle-class wages: Correcting the upward bias of the official [consumer price index] adds more than 1 percent per year to official estimates of the growth in median and mean wages. Cumulatively since 1977, my best estimate of the upward bias in the CPI cumulates to 38 percent between 1977 and 2006.
3. In a blockbuster, the blog Political Calculations finds that there has been absolutely no meaningful change in the inequality of individual income earners in the years from 1994 through 2010. It would seem then that the real complaint of such people isnt about rising income inequality, but rather, how people choose to group themselves together into their families and households.
4. Brand-new research from University of Chicagos Bruce Meyer and Notre Dames James Sullivan, who find that median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.
5. A 2008 paper by Christian Broda and John Romalis from the University of Chicago documents how traditional measures of inequality ignore how inflation affects the rich and poor differently: Inflation of the richest 10 percent of American households has been 6 percentage points higher than that of the poorest 10 percent over the period 19942005. This means that real inequality in America, if you measure it correctly, has been roughly unchanged.
...here are the numbers according to the CIA and UN.
Seriously, do we really want the US to be become more like the 81 other countries that are 'more equal'?
Anyone here think this is bad and wants us to cut poor incomes by 18%?Fuck the CBO.....they're Obama puppets....CBO is the source, Between 1929 and 2007 the increase in income for the poorest 20% of Americans rose 18%. The increase for the middle class increased 40%; and, the increase for for the richest 1% was 275%.
...here are the numbers according to the CIA and UN.
Seriously, do we really want the US to be become more like the 81 other countries that are 'more equal'?
Again, the floor is the floor wherever you go. The ceiling is the thing that has a chance to change.
The slate of results reported on Tuesday showed varied sales numbers.
Saks Fifth Avenue had a large same-store sales increase of 15.5 percent for the quarter.
Home Depot’s sales were strong; the discount retailer T. J. Maxx had a good sales quarter;
and Wal-Mart said its same-store sales in the United States had declined by 0.9 percent.
"There are liars, damn liars and statistics"
Mark Twain.
Here's another statistic:
CBO is the source, Between 1929 and 2007 the increase in income for the poorest 20% of Americans rose 18%. The increase for the middle class increased 40%; and, the increase for for the richest 1% was 275%.
This is one of those stats that always makes me question the motivation of the poster who posted it.
People are not stagnant in any economic class. There is always movement and it has a tendency to be up0ward unless there's something, like the obama Recovery, that is holding it back.
The richest aside, since they are the richest and have no bracket to creep up to, the other classes not only increased the wealth of those in the class, but also had those who rose to a new class increase even more.
It's impossible to classify the rise of wealth in the USA since the Great Depression as anything short of astonishing.
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/about/news/IntergenerationalMobility.pdfInternational comparisons indicate that intergenerational mobility in Britain is of the same order of magnitude as in the US, but that these countries are substantially less mobile than Canada and the Nordic countries. Germany also looks to be more mobile than the UK and US, but a small sample size prevents us drawing a firm conclusion.
International comparisons of intergenerational mobility show that Britain, like the United States, is at the lower end of international comparisons of mobility.
Income inequality and the education of Jonathan Chait « The Enterprise Blog
snippet:
1. Research by Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon, generally a liberal fave, finds that not only has the increase of inequality been exaggerated, but it has ceased. The excess growth of mean relative to median income reversed itself after 2000. But maybe he is somehow saying just the opposite, that it has actually not ceased. Weird, that.
2. And Gordonwho, in all fairness, does think incomes are more unequal today than a generation agohas this to say about supposedly stagnant middle-class wages: Correcting the upward bias of the official [consumer price index] adds more than 1 percent per year to official estimates of the growth in median and mean wages. Cumulatively since 1977, my best estimate of the upward bias in the CPI cumulates to 38 percent between 1977 and 2006.
3. In a blockbuster, the blog Political Calculations finds that there has been absolutely no meaningful change in the inequality of individual income earners in the years from 1994 through 2010. It would seem then that the real complaint of such people isnt about rising income inequality, but rather, how people choose to group themselves together into their families and households.
4. Brand-new research from University of Chicagos Bruce Meyer and Notre Dames James Sullivan, who find that median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.
5. A 2008 paper by Christian Broda and John Romalis from the University of Chicago documents how traditional measures of inequality ignore how inflation affects the rich and poor differently: Inflation of the richest 10 percent of American households has been 6 percentage points higher than that of the poorest 10 percent over the period 19942005. This means that real inequality in America, if you measure it correctly, has been roughly unchanged.
"There are liars, damn liars and statistics"
Mark Twain.
Here's another statistic:
CBO is the source, Between 1929 and 2007 the increase in income for the poorest 20% of Americans rose 18%. The increase for the middle class increased 40%; and, the increase for for the richest 1% was 275%.
This is one of those stats that always makes me question the motivation of the poster who posted it.
People are not stagnant in any economic class. There is always movement and it has a tendency to be up0ward unless there's something, like the obama Recovery, that is holding it back.
The richest aside, since they are the richest and have no bracket to creep up to, the other classes not only increased the wealth of those in the class, but also had those who rose to a new class increase even more.
It's impossible to classify the rise of wealth in the USA since the Great Depression as anything short of astonishing.
The part in red is something that many people (and statistics) fail to recognize.
The bottom 20% (earners) in 1990 and 2000 are not the exact same people that are the bottom 20% (earners) in 2010.
When looking at the demographics of the bottom 20% of wage earners, it is consistently people under 30.
How long does a person that started working at age 18 remain under 30 years of age? (Rhetorical question)
Anyone here think this is bad and wants us to cut poor incomes by 18%?Fuck the CBO.....they're Obama puppets....CBO is the source, Between 1929 and 2007 the increase in income for the poorest 20% of Americans rose 18%. The increase for the middle class increased 40%; and, the increase for for the richest 1% was 275%.
Anyone here think this is bad and wants us to cut poor incomes by 18%?Fuck the CBO.....they're Obama puppets.
Whatever......this is Obama's economy. Anything that happens falls on him in a real world.
The income gap is widening because of inflation and taxes.
The US Dollar is worth less and hidden tax increases are hitting the poor and middle-class the hardest.
Gas tax
Cigarette tax
Liquor tax
New EPA regulations that are causing electric bills to go up
Wage freezes
Obama is causing all of this.
No it isn't. Lot's of empty talk here but any income gap is caused by the fact that some work more hours, get more education, and stay on the job longer than others. We're seeing a cultural divide that's increasing....The income gap is widening because of inflation and taxes...
This is one of those stats that always makes me question the motivation of the poster who posted it.
People are not stagnant in any economic class. There is always movement and it has a tendency to be up0ward unless there's something, like the obama Recovery, that is holding it back.
The richest aside, since they are the richest and have no bracket to creep up to, the other classes not only increased the wealth of those in the class, but also had those who rose to a new class increase even more.
It's impossible to classify the rise of wealth in the USA since the Great Depression as anything short of astonishing.
The part in red is something that many people (and statistics) fail to recognize.
The bottom 20% (earners) in 1990 and 2000 are not the exact same people that are the bottom 20% (earners) in 2010.
When looking at the demographics of the bottom 20% of wage earners, it is consistently people under 30.
How long does a person that started working at age 18 remain under 30 years of age? (Rhetorical question)
This misses the broad point. What you have written can be true whether aggregate wealth has increased, decreased or remained stagnant. It tells us nothing about the broad increases or decreases in aggregate wealth.
If the statistical median of a population is stagnant, it must be that for a subset rising from the lower half to the upper half, there must be an offsetting subset falling from the upper half to the lower half.
For example, over the past 40+ years, the real wages for white males without a high school education have declined. That does not mean that a specific white guy at 20 years of age in 1968 made the same inflation-adjusted income as he did at 63 years of age today. What it means is that broadly, as a group, the real incomes of uneducated white men has broadly declined since then.
If you ask "Are Americans better off than X years ago?" the answer is not that some people went up in income and some went down. The answer is what is the broad increase of wealth and how the broad population did.
"There are liars, damn liars and statistics"
Mark Twain.
Here's another statistic:
CBO is the source, Between 1929 and 2007 the increase in income for the poorest 20% of Americans rose 18%. The increase for the middle class increased 40%; and, the increase for for the richest 1% was 275%.
This is one of those stats that always makes me question the motivation of the poster who posted it.
People are not stagnant in any economic class. There is always movement and it has a tendency to be up0ward unless there's something, like the obama Recovery, that is holding it back.
The richest aside, since they are the richest and have no bracket to creep up to, the other classes not only increased the wealth of those in the class, but also had those who rose to a new class increase even more.
It's impossible to classify the rise of wealth in the USA since the Great Depression as anything short of astonishing.
The part in red is something that many people (and statistics) fail to recognize.
The bottom 20% (earners) in 1990 and 2000 are not the exact same people that are the bottom 20% (earners) in 2010.
When looking at the demographics of the bottom 20% of wage earners, it is consistently people under 30.
How long does a person that started working at age 18 remain under 30 years of age? (Rhetorical question)
You bet.Have you got anything to back this up? .....any income gap is caused by the fact that some work more hours, get more education, and stay on the job longer than others. We're seeing a cultural divide that's increasing.
--and years on the job--Heritage said:The average education level of working age householders in the top quintile is four years greater than those in the bottom quintile. Thus, income inequality in the United States is intensified by the fact that more highly skilled and more productive workers tend to work more while low skilled workers work less...
You bet.Have you got anything to back this up? .....any income gap is caused by the fact that some work more hours, get more education, and stay on the job longer than others. We're seeing a cultural divide that's increasing.
From Income Inequality: How Census Data Misrepresent Income Distribution we get more hours--
--education--
--and years on the job--Heritage said:The average education level of working age householders in the top quintile is four years greater than those in the bottom quintile. Thus, income inequality in the United States is intensified by the fact that more highly skilled and more productive workers tend to work more while low skilled workers work less...
These factors go to secondary affects where educated hard working knowlegeble people who've worked up the ladder end up paying higher taxes while those that haven't collect more benefits. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I like things this way. I'm saying first we have to accept that it's reality that we have to deal with, and that our choice of solutions must fit what is.
Many people argue that the pattern of world growth over the past 20 years has not been beneficial. They point out that globalisation-driven growth has gone hand in hand with a growth in inequality. This inequality is a worry in its own right (communities get broken up; the poor get left behind) and also a missed opportunity (emerging markets might have done better still if only their extra wealth had been distributed more fairly). Is this charge against globalisation true? And, if it is, does it follow that globalisation has been a failure because its benefits have been pinched by the rich?
The evidence that the rich have done best is certainly compelling. Inequality has risen in both rich and poor countries. It is thus a sharp break from the pattern established between 1950 and 1990, when there was a general decline in inequality, notably in East Asia, where the tigers managed to combine fast growth with relatively equal incomes.
But it is not so clear that globalisationin the sense of opening up to trade and foreign investmentis to blame. Ukraine and Poland both opened themselves in the 1990s. Yet inequality rose in Poland and fell in Ukraine. Globalisation, it seems, sometimes increases inequality, sometimes reduces it.
A more plausible culprit for rising inequality seems to be technological progress (see chart below). This is associated with inequality in poor countries because in emerging markets the people best able to take advantage of new technology are those who already have an education and who are usually among the richest in society. The more technological progress, therefore, the better the well-off do.
But to limit technology to reduce inequality would be a cure worse than the disease. Technology in its broadest sensethe flow of new ideasis the only way of getting growth rates up to 5-10% a year, the rate which enables poor countries to catch up with the West. Without it, growth would be dependent on labour and capital inputs, and growth would be just a few percent. To reduce technological progresseven supposing one could do itwould be to condemn poor countries to stay poor.
In fact, since the mid-1990s, the incomes of the poorest fifth have risen everywhere except, marginally, in Latin America, where they have been affected by the after-shocks of debt crises. In Asia, the real incomes of the poorest fifth rose 4% a year; in Africa, by 2% a year, faster than the rise for other income groups.
The result is that the number of very poor people in the world is falling fasteven though many critics continue to believe that the poor have not really benefited from growth. In 1990 those on $1 a day accounted for more than a quarter of the population of developing countries. By 2015, on current rates, the proportion of very poor people should have shrunk to 10%. Moreover, these monetary measures probably understate the real gains from things such as lower child mortality, safer water, literacy and other social achievements. A rich man appreciates his extra cash but this does not compare with what a poor family gains from seeing an infant survive childhood or learn to write.
International trade accounts for only a small share of growing income inequality and labor-market displacement in the United States. Lawrence deconstructs the gap in real blue-collar wages and labor productivity growth between 1981 and 2006 and estimates how much higher these wages might have been had income growth been distributed proportionately and how much of the gap is due to measurement and technical factors about which little can be done. While increased trade with developing countries may have played some part in causing greater inequality in the 1980s, surprisingly, over the past decade the impact of such trade on inequality has been relatively small. Many imports are no longer produced in the United States, and US goods and services that do compete with imports are not particularly intensive in unskilled labor. Rising income inequality and slow real wage growth since 2000 reflect strong profit growth, much of which may be cyclical, and dramatic income gains for the top 1 percent of wage earners, a development that is more closely related to asset-market performance and technological and institutional innovations rather than conventional trade in goods and services. The minor role of trade, therefore, suggests that any policy that focuses narrowly on trade to deal with wage inequality and job loss is likely to be ineffective. Instead, policymakers should (a) use the tax system to improve income distribution and (b) implement adjustment policies to deal more generally with worker and community dislocation.
Much of the growing wage inequality stems from increased inequality between firms rather than within firms, suggesting inequality is driven by changes in firm-level productivity related to new technology rather than to international trade or institutions. Trade protectionism or re-energising unions may do relatively little to reverse the increase in inequality. ...
It is well-known and entirely understandable that different firms have different productivity levels. A key finding in our work is that the productivity gap between firms has been widening. We look at two groups of firms: one at the top (90th level) and one at the bottom (10th level) of the productivity distribution. Between 1984 and 2001, the rate of growth in productivity has been 17% for firms at the top and only 8% for firms at the bottom. Productivity for firms in the middle has grown by 14%. Measuring productivity dispersion as the difference between the top (90th level) and the bottom (10th level) deciles, this 90-10 differential
increased by 33% between 1984 and 2001. ...
We also document that much of the increase in individual wage inequality in the UK occurred between firms within the same industry (between-firm component) instead of within firms (within-firm component). This is an important finding when looking for culprits of wage inequality. It says that little of extra inequality has come from a change in the way firms treat their own workers. The main source is the change in firm-level productivity. This implies that understanding the evolution of productivity distribution between firms may be critical in understanding the evolution of wage distribution (we also show that the correlation between wages and productivity has become more important over time). ...
In terms of policy, this suggests that the causes of rising inequality are primarily structural and related to new technology rather than to trade or institutions. Thus greater trade protectionism or the re-energising of unions may do relatively little to reverse the increase in inequality. A better strategy would be to concentrate on raising the skill and education levels of the workforce, particularly the skills of those at the bottom of the ability distribution.
The U.S. wage structure evolved across the last century: narrowing from 1910 to 1950, fairly stable in the 1950s and 1960s, widening rapidly during the 1980s, and polarizing since the late 1980s. We document the spectacular rise of U.S. wage inequality after 1980 and place recent changes into a century-long historical perspective to understand the sources of change. The majority of the increase in wage inequality since 1980 can be accounted for by rising educational wage differentials, just as a substantial part of the decrease in wage inequality in the earlier era can be accounted for by decreasing educational wage differentials.
Although skill-biased technological change has generated rapid growth in the relative demand for more-educated workers for at least the past century, increases in the supply of skills, from rising educational attainment of the U.S. work force, more than kept pace for most of the twentieth century. Since 1980, however, a sharp decline in skill supply growth driven by a slowdown in the rise of educational attainment of successive U.S. born cohorts has been a major factor in the surge in educational wage differentials. Polarization set in during the late 1980s with employment shifts into high- and low-wage jobs at the expense of the middle leading to rapidly rising upper tail wage inequality but modestly falling lower tail wage inequality.
Subir Lall, the IMF's deputy chief for research ... said it found that, overall, wealth increased through globalization. In the great majority of countries, the income of lower-income workers has risen in the past two decades, but at a slower pace than for higher-skilled workers. As a result, the gap between haves and have-nots has widened.
The policy lesson, Mr. Lall said, is the need for greater investment in education. "This would allow less-skilled and low-income groups to capitalize on the opportunities from" technology and globalization, the IMF report said. ...
The IMF researchers separated "globalization" into three components -- technology, foreign investment and trade -- and looked at how changes in each of the three corresponded with changes in income inequality globally. According to the results, technology and foreign investment deepened income inequality, while trade diminished it. Overall, globalization has contributed "moderately to net changes in income shares," the IMF found.
That approach matches with--...A more plausible culprit for rising inequality seems to be technological progress (see chart below). This is associated with inequality in poor countries because in emerging markets the people best able to take advantage of new technology are those who already have an education and who are usually among the richest in society. The more technological progress, therefore, the better the well-off do.
...
