“Inequality wasn’t the answer”

A friend suggested, in an email, that I may have been “on to something” when I presented my “Mind the Gap” paper at the Volcano symposium. The evidence is a recent column by Heather Stewart, who reports on last week’s OECD forum in Paris. For a long time, the growing gap between rich and poor [...]

Where has all the surplus gone?

Where has all the surplus gone? As in 2010, a good chunk of it has gone to pay Chief Executive Officers of major U.S. companies. According to a new Associated Press study, the head of a typical public company in United States made $9.6 million in 2011. This figure was up more than 6 percent [...]

Chart of the day

source dedicated to all my friends at UK

Protest of the day

Another day of protests in Chicago, as NATO begins its two-day summit.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Why I won’t be giving a TED talk anytime soon

  I won’t be giving a TED talk anytime soon. Not that I’ve been invited. Or ever expect to be invited. But Nick Hanauer [ht: sm] was, and the TED folks decided his talk was too controversial to post. Here’s a link to the text of his talk. Since 1980 the share of income for [...]

Against conventional wisdom

Here are a few things to keep in mind while I take a brief hiatus. . . 1. Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom, Social Security is not going broke. In fact, last year it ran a surplus and, as David Cay Johnston argues, the growth of that surplus has had two major negative effects: One effect [...]

Back in a week. . .

Mind the store while I head off to try to convince the audience to “Mind the Gap” (with a presentation subtitled “Economics, Inequality, and the Second Great Depression”). Here are the slides for my talk [pdf]. I’ll be developing some of the arguments I made recently in an hour-long interview on KPFA.

Capitalism kills—with a lag

Does capitalist inequality increase mortality? According to a new study by Hui Zheng, published in Social Science & Medicine (paywall), a 0.01 rise in the Gini coefficient increases the cumulative odds of death by 122 percent in the following 12 years. The marginal effect peaks in year 7 and continues to exist through year 12. [...]

Inequality and the “miracle” of Asian growth

Changyong Rhee, chief economist at the Asian Development Bank, clearly recognizes the problem of growing inequality in Asia: Over the past 20 years, the gap between Asia’s rich and poor has widened so that the richest 1 per cent of Asian households now account for 6 per cent to 8 per cent of expenditure. Income [...]