How does the 1 percent capture the surplus?

The share of income captured by the 1 percent more than doubled (from 10 to 20.1 percent) between 1980 and 2013. How did they do it? Well, we know the tiny group at the top received much higher CEO salaries as well as stock dividends, capital gains, interest payments, and rent on the land and buildings they […]

How the other 1 percent lives

The Guardian reports on Gatti House, a luxury building on the Strand, that looks to give its upper-crust residents a slice of the good life via “pizza elevators” that transport culinary delights directly to the master bedroom.   Each of the four flats in the luxury Gatti House development has a butler’s lift in the master […]

Honey, we shrunk the top 1 percent

The share of total income captured by the top 1 percent actually shrunk in 2013, falling from 21.22 percent to 18.98. But, as Emmanuel Saez [pdf] explains, that decline is probably a statistical anomaly: The fall in top incomes in 2013 is due to the 2013 increase in top tax rates (top tax rates increased […]

Political philosophy for the 1 percent

Harvard’s Greg Mankiw fancies himself a political philosopher. The problem is, he’s not very good at it. But, even then, he manages to cobble together a political philosophy that serves the interests of the tiny minority at the top of the current economic system. You won’t learn much about political philosophy from reading Mankiw’s latest. […]

Rent-seeking and the 1 percent

I’m intrigued by the increasing references to rent-seeking as a way of making sense of the grotesquely unequal distribution of income in the United States. What explains this trend? We now have Joseph Stiglitz, Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, and Paul Krugman all referring to rents or rent-seeking in order to analyze how the 1 […]

Trying desperately to defend the 1 percent

I’ve often said that the Occupy Wall Street movement’s greatest contribution, to date, has been to focus on the opposition between the 1 percent and everyone else. And, to judge from Greg Mankiw’s latest, the OWS argument continues to have considerable bite. That’s because Mankiw, in an attempt to defend the 1 percent, throws everything […]

Taxes, surplus, and the top 1 percent

We know that U.S. economic inequality—especially the share of income going to the top 1 percent—has been increasing for about three decades. The question is, can the latest research assist us in making sense of the ways top income-earners in the United States have been managing to capture a larger and larger share of the […]

The 1 percent and marginal productivity theory

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez can be credited with supplying the data behind the 1 percent/99 percent opposition that has been central to the Occupy Wall Street movement. We can also credit them—through Saez—for putting another nail in the coffin of neoclassical marginal productivity theory. DG: I’m prompted by your last point to suggest that […]

Red Scare 2018: socialism and healthcare

A specter is haunting the United States—the specter of Medicare for All. All the powers of old America have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Wall Street and Big Pharma, Trump and McConnell, Fox News and the American Enterprise Institute. Now, “coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth—and, more important, on […]

10 years after

The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought — Rudi Dornbusch Last week, a wide variety of U.S. media (including the Wall Street Journal and USA Today) marked what they considered to be the ten-year anniversary of the beginning of the […]