What do we mean by inequality comparisons? If the rich just get richer and the poor get poorer, the answer might seem easy. But what if the income distribution changes in a complicated way? Can we ...use mathematical or statistical techniques to simplify the comparison problem in a way that has economic meaning? What does it mean to measure inequality? Is it similar to National Income? Or price index? Is it enough just to work out the Gini coefficient? This book tackles these questions and examines the underlying principles of inequality measurement and its relation to welfare economics, distributional analysis, and information theory. The book covers modern theoretical developments in inequality analysis, as well as showing how the way we think about inequality today has been shaped by classic contributions in economics and related disciplines. Formal results and detailed literature discussion are provided in two appendices. The principal points are illustrated in the main text, using examples from US and UK data, as well as other data sources, and associated web materials provide hands-on learning.
Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy ...bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. InFault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.
Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America's growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy's long-term health; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.
InFault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.
In Privilege and Anxiety , Hagen Koo examines what has
happened to the Korean middle class in the era of neoliberal
globalization and demonstrates that global economic change brought
more profound ...changes than mere economic decline and shrinking size
to this class.
Globalization has inserted an axis of polarization into the
middle class, separating a small minority that benefits from the
globalized economy from the large majority that suffers from it.
This internal differentiation generates a challenging dynamic
within Korean society, as the newly affluent seek to distinguish
themselves from the rest of the middle class to establish a new,
privileged class position. Privilege and Anxiety explores
how these tensions play out in three areas: consumption and
lifestyle, residential differentiation, and education. In all three
areas, the dominant orientation of the affluent middle class is to
preserve their newfound privilege and to pass it onto their
children. Their new class practices, Koo argues, bring great
anxiety to both the winners and losers of neoliberal
globalization.
Closing the enrollment income gap Wible, Brad
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
03/2021, Volume:
371, Issue:
6533
Journal Article
Choosing Justice Norman Frohlich; Joe A. Oppenheimer
07/2023
eBook
This book presents an entirely new answer to the question: "What is fair?" In their radical approach to ethics, Frohlich and Oppenheimer argue that much of the empirical methodology of the natural ...sciences should be applied to the ethical questions of fairness and justice.
Taxing the Rich Scheve, Kenneth; Stasavage, David
2016, 2016., 20160329, 2016-03-29
eBook
In today's social climate of acknowledged and growing inequality, why are there not greater efforts to tax the rich? In this wide-ranging and provocative book, Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage ask ...when and why countries tax their wealthiest citizens-and their answers may surprise you.
Taxing the Rich draws on unparalleled evidence from twenty countries over the last two centuries to provide the broadest and most in-depth history of progressive taxation available. Scheve and Stasavage explore the intellectual and political debates surrounding the taxation of the wealthy while also providing the most detailed examination to date of when taxes have been levied against the rich and when they haven't. Fairness in debates about taxing the rich has depended on different views of what it means to treat people as equals and whether taxing the rich advances or undermines this norm. Scheve and Stasavage argue that governments don't tax the rich just because inequality is high or rising-they do it when people believe that such taxes compensate for the state unfairly privileging the wealthy. Progressive taxation saw its heyday in the twentieth century, when compensatory arguments for taxing the rich focused on unequal sacrifice in mass warfare. Today, as technology gives rise to wars of more limited mobilization, such arguments are no longer persuasive.
Taxing the Rich shows how the future of tax reform will depend on whether political and economic conditions allow for new compensatory arguments to be made.
India has one of the fastest growing economies on earth. Over the past three decades, socialism has been replaced by pro-business policies as the way forward. And yet, in this 'new' India, grinding ...poverty is still a feature of everyday life. Some 450 million people subsist on less than $1.25 per day and nearly half of India's children are malnourished. In his latest book, Atul Kohli, a seasoned scholar of Indian politics and economics, blames this discrepancy on the narrow nature of the ruling alliance in India that, in its new-found relationship with business, has prioritized economic growth above all other social and political considerations. This thoughtful and challenging book affords an alternative vision of India's rise in the world that its democratic rulers will be forced to come to grips with in the years ahead.
This paper presents direct measures of capital costs, equal to the product of the required rate of return on capital and the value of the capital stock. The capital share, equal to the ratio of ...capital costs and gross value added, does not offset the decline in the labor share. Instead, a large increase in the share of pure profits offsets declines in the shares of both labor and capital. Industry data show that increases in concentration are associated with declines in the labor share.
Abstract
We document the evolution of market power based on firm-level data for the U.S. economy since 1955. We measure both markups and profitability. In 1980, aggregate markups start to rise from ...21% above marginal cost to 61% now. The increase is driven mainly by the upper tail of the markup distribution: the upper percentiles have increased sharply. Quite strikingly, the median is unchanged. In addition to the fattening upper tail of the markup distribution, there is reallocation of market share from low- to high-markup firms. This rise occurs mostly within industry. We also find an increase in the average profit rate from 1% to 8%. Although there is also an increase in overhead costs, the markup increase is in excess of overhead. We discuss the macroeconomic implications of an increase in average market power, which can account for a number of secular trends in the past four decades, most notably the declining labor and capital shares as well as the decrease in labor market dynamism.
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