In the first chapter, I analyze the evolution of income inequality in the United States from the 1950s to present. I show that the share of national income going to those in the upper reaches of the income ladder has increased considerably over the last three and a half decades, and that...
Wealth inequality today in the United States is extreme and growing, and we talk about it a lot when someone throws a brick through the window of a Google bus. Lots of smart people have already written about this, but here are two images to quickly show what the skew looks like: 今天,...
Outside forces were also at work undermining the New Deal. In 1943, Florida passed the first “right to work” law that stifled the labor movement and created a template for other states to attack and weaken unions. In 1944’sNLRB v. Hearst Publications, Inc.,the Supreme Court created a ...
This paper analyzes the microeconomic sources of wage inequality in the United States from 1967-2012. Decomposing inequality into factors categorized by degree of personal responsibility, we find that education is able to explain more than twice as much of inequality today as 45 years ago. However...
aIncome inequality is a major problem in the United States. Not only is income inequality grossly unfair, but it also indicates lifespan inequality, educational inequality and it stunts economic growth. According to the handout, the top 1% of Americans make 8 to 10 times more money than 99%...
Based on tax, survey and national accounts data in the United States, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics inFrancehave found that there has been close to zero growth for working-age adults in...
Earlier today, in a lecture to the same Chinese students, I made the same point but used a different country as an example. Courtesy of Our World in Data, here’s a look at inequality in both the United States and Sweden. When I presented this chart to my Chinese students, I asked ...
MANILA, Philippines --- Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in his latest book "The Price of Inequality," describes the state of economy in the United States today as one, where 40% of the wealth is owned by a privileged 1%. In fact, he had coined the expression "1% (and the...
Income and wealth inequality was very high a century ago, particularly in Europe, but dropped dramatically in the first half of the 20th century. Income inequality has surged back in the United States since the 1970s so that the United States is much more unequal than Europe today. We ...
Slavery in the United States has a direct relation to current income inequality. There is a cross-state relationship between the Gini coefficient of land inequality in 1860 and the Gini coefficient of income inequality in 2000. The relationship is strong, underlying the impact of past slave use ...