The Unbroken Window

You’ll often hear railing that CEO pay is nuts and immorally high. After all, who needs $11 million per year? And how can it be necessary or fair to have CEOs running around making 400 times the typical worker pay, while 25 years ago that number was roughly 30 times larger.
Fine, have those opinions, I [...]

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This article discusses a new phenomenon: for the first time ever, the number of “poor” in suburban America exceeds the number of “poor” in urban cities.
Here is an excerpt:
There are certain comparative advantages to being poor in a place other than inner-city Cleveland or Detroit. Whatever else he may fear, Price doesn’t have to worry [...]

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“Excessive” inequality seems not to have been brought by Columbus, nor by colonial powers for several centuries, but largely after independence in the 19th century:
Compared with the rest of the world, inequality was not high in pre-conquest 1491, nor was it high in the post-conquest decades following 1492. Indeed, it was not even high in [...]

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Economists and other social scientists have long been interested in measures of income inequality. Most such measures are based on individual or household income at a moment in time. However, as a measure of the distribution of welfare, the typical income inequality measure leaves out an important dimension: the length of time over which an [...]

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Some folks argue that “we” are too obsessed with income, and that more income, at some point, does not mean more happiness. Their obvious conclusion is that higher taxes on “the rich” are not only OK, but justifiable on some cosmic level. But others have pointed out, rightly, that there is much more to inequality [...]

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I was asked to write a review of Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz’s, The Race Between Education and Technology.Here is a long-winded, unedited version of it. Among the stuff that did not make it is that I don’t view it as important to have the world’s most educated public, nor do I view it [...]

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Contrary to Krugman’s narrative, liberals joined conservatives in pushing for dramatic changes in economic policy. In addition to his role in liberalizing immigration, Kennedy was a leader in pushing through both the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 and the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which deregulated the trucking industry-and he was warmly supported in both [...]

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Below is a chart that shows how family income has grown over time for families at different levels of initial income. For the sake of this post, let’s ignore measurement issues and whether or not these data accurately capture what is happening to the income of a particular person over time.
What you see below is [...]

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 Study the following table for a moment:

It shows the distribution of household income by race. For EVERY racial group you see that the median income of households have gone up, rather substantially, since 1975. There have even been some fairly sizable gains since 1995. How can you square this data with the “conventional wisdom” that [...]

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From David Henderson:
1. High-income households are not likely to consist of one person earning a very high income (as is often assumed); rather, they are likely to have two or more income earners:

In 2006, a whopping 81.4 percent of families in the top income quintile had two or more people working, and only 2.2 percent [...]

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