U.S. income inequality, on rise for decades, is now highest since 1928 President Obama took on a topic yesterday that most Americans don’t like to talk about much: inequality. There are a lot of ways to measure economic inequality (and we’ll be discussing more on Fact Tank), but one basic approach is to look at how much income flows to groups at different steps on the economic ladder. Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley, has been doing just that for years. And according to his research, U.S. income inequality has been increasing steadily since the 1970s, and now has reached levels not seen since 1928. (The GIF file at the top of this post, created by Dorsey Shaw of Buzzfeed, compares growth in average income of the top 1% of Americans with everyone else.) Using tax-return data from the IRS, Saez has built extensive income-distribution datasets going back 100 years. In 1928, the top 1% of families received 23.9% of all pretax income, while the bottom 90% received 50.7%. Americans aren’t unaware of these trends. Topics: Income Inequality
Growing Economic Inequality 'Endangers Our Future' Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Ind. — a city that has weathered many economic storms over the past half-century. Stiglitz went on to study at Amherst College and MIT, where he received a Ph.D. in economics. He later served on and chaired President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and became the chief economist at the World Bank. "I saw discrimination lead to poverty, I saw episodic high levels of unemployment, I saw business cycles, and I saw all kinds of inequalities," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. In his latest book, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, Stiglitz argues that widely unequal societies don't function effectively or have stable economies and that even the rich will pay a steep price if economic inequalities continue to worsen. In the current system, top income earners who make their money through capital gains and stock dividends pay lower effective tax rates than the average person. On lobbying
Look Into My Eyes. Not Persuaded? You're Not Alone. : Shots - Health News Eye contact may prove persuasive only if a person's already on your side, a study finds. iStockphoto.com hide caption toggle caption iStockphoto.com Pop psychology holds that to connect with someone, you should look deep into their eyes. Researchers in Germany tested the power of the eye lock by polling university students about their opinions on controversial issues like assisted suicide, nuclear energy and affirmative action in the workplace. They then had the students watch two-minute Internet videos of people expounding on the controversies. The students spent more time looking into the eyes of the speakers when they agreed with their point of view, and avoided eye contact when they disagreed or were neutral. The students were also less likely to change their opinions, as measured in a second poll, when they looked directly in the speakers' eyes. Interesting, sure, but this was a small study with just 20 students. The study was published online in Psychological Science.
It's impossible to work your way through college nowadays Update (3/29/14): I’ve written up an analysis of national tuition cost trends in a new blog post. It turns out that Michigan State University’s tuition situation isn’t uncommon! Earlier today, I ran across a conversation about how the cost of tuition at Michigan State University (MSU) has changed over the years. I had just finished talking with my grandpa over the phone, and he had spent the latter half of the talk extolling the virtues of working your way through college (without family support), so I was rightly annoyed on the topic already. The creator of the discussion pointed to the historical trends for MSU’s tuition, and in another comment pointed to the Federal minimum wage trends. If you crunch some of the numbers there, you’ll get the chart below showing the number of hours a student must work on minimum wage to pay for a single credit hour at MSU. Modern students have to work as much as 6x longer to pay for college than 30 years ago
How Successful People Make The Most Of Their Weekends 5 Best Things to Say in an Interview By Catherine ConlanMonster Contributing Writer The best things you can say in an interview won’t necessarily get you the job on their own, but they can certainly pave the way. Keep these five things in mind as you go through the interviewing process to give yourself the best chance at landing the job. Ask Good Questions According to Howard Pines, founder and CEO of BeamPines, “the best thing a candidate can do at an interview is ask good questions.” Doing so shows that you are thoughtful and interested in understanding the company. Pines suggests several questions, including: What are the biggest short- and long-term issues I would need to focus on in this position? Whether it’s about possible job duties, a potential start date or simply timing for the second interview, stressing your flexibility makes you easy to get along with. Hiring managers don’t like complications, and having to coordinate complicated schedules or haggle over a job description eventually just makes you look difficult.
It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays, revisited with national data Last weekend, I wrote a brief rant about how it’s far more difficult to work your way through college nowadays than 30 years ago. Some folks took it for a scientific study rather than the rant it was, and criticized it for only looking at Michigan State University’s tuition trends. In response, I decided to run a proper analysis of national public university tuition data. With the help of some of my awesome Twitter followers, I managed to find a comprehensive data set of the in-state tuition costs for all public 4-year universities in the U.S. from 1987 through 2010. To save you the data wrangling, I’ll provide the data set here. Hours worked on minimum wage to pay for 1 year of public university tuition in the U.S. We immediately see a trend similar to before, but the data is limited between 1987 and 2010. To get a better sense of the trend, I fit a linear regression to the data. Other commenters were eager to point out that I left out financial aid from this analysis.
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Surviving the post-employment economy - Opinion A lawyer. A computer scientist. A military analyst. A teacher. What do these people have in common? Unemployed graduates are told that their predicament is their own fault. Changing your major will not change a broken economy. People devalued In the United States, nine percent of computer science graduates are unemployed, and 14.7 percent of those who hold degrees in information systems have no job. It is not skills or majors that are being devalued. Academics face particular derision for their choice of profession. It is true that the academic job market has been terrible for decades. Best of bad options Despite the dire employment conditions of higher education, young people continue to enrol in graduate school. "But it is not just about your current earnings," the detractor continues, "It is about the wages you lose while in the programme." We live in the tunnel at the end of the light. Higher education is merely a symptom of a broader economic disease. Failure of the system
23 Signs You're Secretly An Introvert Think you can spot an introvert in a crowd? Think again. Although the stereotypical introvert may be the one at the party who’s hanging out alone by the food table fiddling with an iPhone, the “social butterfly” can just as easily have an introverted personality. “Spotting the introvert can be harder than finding Waldo,” Sophia Dembling, author of “The Introvert’s Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World,” tells The Huffington Post. People are frequently unaware that they’re introverts -– especially if they’re not shy — because they may not realize that being an introvert is about more than just cultivating time alone. “Introversion is a basic temperament, so the social aspect — which is what people focus on — is really a small part of being an introvert,” Dr. Despite the growing conversation around introversion, it remains a frequently misunderstood personality trait. But more and more introverts are speaking out about what it really means to be a “quiet” type. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Rich got 14.6% richer in 2013 Global private financial wealth grew by 14.6 per cent in 2013 to reach a total of $152 trillion, with the spike in stock prices helping to power the expansion, according to a study from Boston Consulting Group. Wealth is growing most quickly in the Asia-Pacific area, excluding Japan, where it expanded by 30.5 per cent in the year. The Asia-Pacific region is expected to overtake Western Europe in 2014 to become the second-wealthiest region and to beat out North America to become the wealthiest part of the world by 2018, the report said. The Boston Consulting Group has done an annual study of private wealth for the past 14 years, estimating the cumulative amount of cash and deposits, money market funds, and listed securities around the world. Wealth grows faster than economy The IMF estimates that the world’s economic growth in 2013 was 2.9 per cent and will rise to 3.6 per cent in 2014. 1 of 10 The U.S. had 7.1 million millionaire households, the highest number in the world.
Butterick’s Practical Typography The "Tytler" Insult -- Is Democracy Hopeless? Well... it's back. One of the best examples of a mass-hypnotic pseudo-wisdom that helps to lobotomize politics in American life. "A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship." This widely-circulated nostrum is called the "Tytler Calumny" and it is the great example of what has gone wrong with the mental processes of our friends on the right, who used to be represented in sage debate by great minds like Barry Goldwater and Friedrich Hayek and William F. It is often accompanied by another feat of cynicism called the Fatal Sequence. Ah. Huh.