The Reign of the One Percenters: Income Inequality and the Death of Culture in New York City. For my daughter’s benefit, so that she might know the enemy better, know what he looks like, where he nests, and when and where to throw eggs at his head, we start the tour at Wall Street.
It’s hot. August. We’re sweating like old cheese. Here are the monuments that matter, I tell her: the offices of Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon; the JPMorgan Chase tower up the block; around the corner, the AIG building. The structures dwarf us, imposing themselves skyward. “Linked together like rat warrens, with air conditioning,” I tell her. She doesn’t know what sociopath means. “It’s a person who doesn’t care about anybody but himself. Long roll of eyes. I’m intent on making this a teachable moment for my daughter, who is fifteen, but I have to quit the vitriol, break it down for her. On a smaller scale, I want Léa to understand what New York, my birthplace and home, once beloved to me, is really about. Cancer And what do the suit people do to earn such heaping returns?
Rotten Vegetables. Global Equality and the Lucas Horse Race. It is possible that although inequality within many countries is rising, global inequality is actually falling.
After all, a number of countries with lower levels of per capita income, like China and India, have been experiencing rapid growth. Perhaps from a global viewpoint, the gap between high and low incomes is diminishing even though within countries, that gap has been rising. In the Winter 2000 issue of my own Journal of Economic Perspectives, Robert E. Lucas contributed "Some Macroeconomics for the 21st Century. " He offers a horse-racing metaphor that I have found useful in explaining the rise in global inequality over the last couple of centuries--and he predicts that the 21st century will be one of greater global equality. "We consider real production per capita, in a world of many countries evolving through time. What is the evidence on global inequality? The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (9781608193417): Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson. Income Inequalities and Social Ills. Daniel Little: Income inequalities and social ills, by Daniel Little: According to Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, income inequalities in a society are a source of a variety of social problems in that society, almost without regard to the absolute level of income in the society.
Their basic measure of inequality across countries and states in the United States is the ratio of income from the top quintile to the bottom quintile. (They also sometimes make use of the Gini coefficient.) The quintile income ratio varies across OECD countries from a low of about 4 (Japan) to a high of just under 10 (Singapore). The United States has the second highest ratio, at about 8.5 (figure 2.1).In order to empirically evaluate the impact of a society's income inequalities on social well-being, they construct an Index of Health and Social Problems for each country and US state.
This is indeed a striking hypothesis.