The New Inequality

By: Catzmaw
Published On: 12/10/2006 2:36:19 AM

David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about income inequality. Jim Webb was not alone in his assessment in the Wall Street Journal.

Some highlights:

Economic inequality has now been increasing in the United States for more than 30 years ... Computers and other new technologies replaced many blue-collar workers, undercutting the bargaining power of those workers ... Highly educated workers, on the other hand, were able to work more efficiently GÇö and thus make more money GÇö thanks to new technology ...

... Over the last five years, the average pay of college graduates grew at only a little better rate than inflation ... Even families at the 90th percentile of the income distribution (now earning about $110,000 a year) have received only a marginally bigger raise over the last decade than those in the middle of the distribution.

... two economists ..., Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, have [been] conducting more detailed studies and discovering that at the very highest levels of the income ladder, inequality has indeed continued to accelerate. The top 0.1 percent of earners GÇö thatGÇÖs one out of every 1,000 families GÇö made 6.8 percent of the nationGÇÖs pretax income in 2004, up from 4.7 percent a decade earlier and about 2 percent in the GÇÖ60s and GÇÖ70s ...

... From World War II through the 1970s, while most Americans were getting solid raises every year, the incomes of the richest 1 percent were doing only a little better than inflation. Since the 1980s, the two groups have switched places. The affluent have received huge gains, and everyone elseGÇÖs pay growth has slowed down. For the last six decades, in other words, the American economy has been much more of a zero-sum game than we might like to believe.

Here's the cite: 

http://www.nytimes.c...

Comments



But they DESERVE it (Teddy - 12/12/2006 7:56:17 PM)
The Republicans confuse affluence with righteousness (or vice verse).  Remember, Friedman's economic fixation on so-called free markets elevates greed, and believes that the hard-driving entrepreneur who creates great mercantile or industrial enterprises deserves to be paid extremely well. He creates not only jobs but the marvel of a consumption economy and, in effect, the wonderful world of plenty in which we now reside--- and everyone else wants to emulate that life style. Of course, a little inequality results because the rest of us are losers compared to the Big Guys, but you can't make an omlet without breakng a few eggs, yada, yada, yada.

Never mind that free markets never are really free, and also never ever fair, or that some desired results will never come from rampant, decadent capitalism. Profit is good, but the bottom line cannot always result in the common good. I read the Webb article, too, and thought Hooray! for Webb. Thanks for posting it.