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Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

nytimes.com

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Re: Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

#171

Post by Hyena »

babblefrog wrote: post #165
lukesandberg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The economic growth since 1978 was, for the most part, produced by the efforts of 10% of the population I don't see how that could be true. productivity gains have been experienced across all levels of the income scale so surely that growth is attributable to more than just the top 10%. Just because that's where the most income growth has been doesn't mean that that is where the growth has been produced, its just wh…

I suspect that supply and demand have a lot to do with it. Capital and innovation is scarcer than labor, especially unskilled or lower skilled labor.

Diffusion, not innovation, drives economic growth. This is simple to demonstrate by looking at the rate of catch-up growth. If there is a problem with economic growth, it is more likely that there are too few diffusion pathways than too little innovation.

Our patent system would tend to point in the direction of diffusion problems, no?

Re: Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

#172

Post by cwp »

sgoranson wrote: post #147
forensic wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics and morality are intimately related. There are SOME free market ideologues who believe that unrestrained corporations will enrich the poor, however I believe they are in the minority. You may be one of them. The majority of libertarians believe that individual property rights are sacrosanct and that it is wrong to forcibly redistribute wealth to prevent poverty, hunger, suffering. This is the argument of the…

Economics is not like religion; there are actual correct and incorrect answers. As a newer field, we not always know how to find the correct answers yet. But that isn't an excuse to start treating it more like religion and less like science. "we can let them keep it and allow people to suffer." Using your feelings to guide your monetary policy decisions is no better than the creationists forcing ID to be taught in sc…

Economics is exactly like religion. There are correct and incorrect answers, but most people ignore them, and believe something that makes them feel good about their place in the world.

Re: Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

#173

Post by w1ntermute »

polshaw wrote: post #155
shawndrost wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that it's gotten harder for blue-collar people in the US. However, those jobs now belong to former subsistence farmers in developing nations, so it's quite different when you look at it from a global perspective.

So what of the uneducated man from a developed nation? Unemployed, by your statement.

And he'd better educate himself if he wants to improve his standing. He was an economic inefficiency that has been unceremoniously weeded out.

Re: Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

#174

Post by woobar »

klbarry wrote: post #25
pinko wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes -- many families have shifted from single to dual-earner in order to maintain the same standard of living, so the household income charts really understate the decline in individual wages over this period.

That is not true. They vastly overstate the decline in wages, due to the rise of more single person households. See: http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=a7jenngfc4um7_&#... Individual wages have risen steadily since 1910, with no gaps. The household income chart is a misleading chart.

This chart has nothing to do with individual wages.

This is a sum of all incomes from all possible sources devided by population.

Re: Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

#175

Post by Hyena »

michaelochurch wrote: post #116

Short story of American inequality: The economic growth since 1978 was, for the most part, produced by the efforts of 10% of the population. It's true. I'm a leftist and I must admit that. That's not to say that the other 90% aren't working hard and don't deserve to share in the gains-- they obviously do-- but those gains are coming from a small percentage of people. Many, many people work hard and deserve to have go…

If only 10% of the population is driving economic growth, that would indicate an intense resource problem. Doesn't it seem plausible that we should seriously consider the possibility that somewhere around 1973 our essentially 19th century system of economics became obsolete and so was unable to drive much growth?

Re: Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

#176

Post by _delirium »

Gormo wrote: post #33

Every time I see this kind of chart, I always wonder why the aggregate income distribution of a population is a metric that anyone ought to be concerned about. What does one person's income have to do with anyone else's - why would you aggregate everyone's separate incomes into a single figure in the first place? And if someone's particular income is insufficient to meet their needs, how do the aggregate population d…

I find the lack of increase in (inflation-adjusted) median wages to be the more interesting headline, not the distribution of wages per se. In effect, the average person has not seen any improvement in prosperity from the large productivity improvements that technology has brought us. I think that's problematic, in part because it makes it harder to argue that the tech sector's growth will bring prosperity to the average person (rather than just to us techies).

Re: Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

#177

Post by scarmig »

Hyena wrote: post #170
scarmig wrote: post #51

The first graph is the most interesting. Productivity has increased substantially while wages have remained relatively stagnant. More of the surplus value of labor has been accumulating to capital. This means that people who get their income primarily from labor have lost a great deal of power vis a vis those whose income comes disproportionately from ownership of capital. Questions and some guesses: 1) Why is this?…

The main problem statistically is how we account income. Generally the employer-paid health insurance and other benefits are not included, even though these can often vastly increase total compensation. Scott Winship did a good job following this but tends to shade into triumphalism.

At least the top graph about productivity refers to "overall compensation."

I don't have a chance to find the original source for the numbers, but unless the graph has been grossly mislabeled, benefits are probably included.

Re: Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

#178

Post by darrenkopp »

william42 wrote: post #144
philiphodgen wrote: post #135

I'm sorry, but there seems to be an omitted first step in the entire comment thread of critiques -- from all comments coming from all political angles: examining the underlying data. The NYT graphic tells a terribly compelling story that supports a particular political point of view. That tickles my bullshit sensor, and tells me it is time to question the underlying data and assumptions. Frankly, this graphic makes m…

It's kind of hard to A/B test an economy.

We're pretty good at it now. A=Republicans, B=Democrats. We switch every couple of election cycles and see how it goes.

Re: Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

#179

Post by Florin_Andrei »

pg wrote: post #36

Technological progress should cause increasing economic inequality, because the bottom end of the scale is firmly anchored at zero (someone taking a vacation), while technology gives the top end ever more powerful levers. So the interesting question is not why economic inequality is increasing, but why for a few decades in the mid twentieth century the trend was reversed. There are probably several factors at work he…

> What happened at the end of the 1970s...

...was that "reaganomics" took over after that.

Re: Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now

#180

Post by vacri »

illumin8 wrote: post #105
learc83 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repost of something I wrote the other day that I think is relevant: My very average house today is a huge luxury compared to the very average house my grandparents bought in the 60s. I have a cable bill, an iPhone bill, an internet bill, a netflix bill, and too many various SaaS subscriptions. My grandparents had none of those. I also have a much higher power bill to pay for all my consumer electronics and air condit…

You wrongly equate material possessions with happiness. I'd easily go back to a 60s quality lifestyle if my wife didn't have to work and I only had to work 40 hours a week to own a nice house. In the 60s they had most of the same electric appliances that we have today, save the microwave oven, personal computer, and the cellphone. I'd bet that eating food that can't be heated in a microwave is probably more healthy f…

I'd bet that eating food that can't be heated in a microwave is probably more healthy for you.

Cooking vegetables in a microwave is one of the best ways to keep nutrition locked in.

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