Income inequality
04-25-2012, 05:58 PM
#22
Retired
Joined APC: Feb 2008
Position: whale wrangler
Posts: 3,527
The law…has converted plunder into a right, In order to protect plunder. -Bastiat
The Sanctifying of Plunder | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty
The Sanctifying of Plunder | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty
06-11-2012, 04:05 AM
#23
Libertarian Resistance
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Joined APC: Feb 2007
Position: 757 FO
Posts: 1,057
recent testimony to senate
Ron Haskins (Brookings Institute) said:
I want to emphasize the importance of individual initiative in reducing poverty and promoting economic success. My Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill and I have spent years emphasizing the importance of individual responsibility in reducing poverty and increasing opportunity. One of our arguments, based in part on a Brookings analysis of Census Bureau data, is that young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success – complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby. Based on an analysis of Census data, people who followed all three of these rules had only a 2 percent chance of being in poverty and a 72 percent chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 in 2010). These numbers were almost precisely reversed for people who violated all three rules, elevating their chance of being poor to 77 percent and reducing their chance of making the middle class to 4 percent.
Individual effort and good decisions about the big events in life are more important than government programs. Call it blaming the victim if you like, but decisions made by individuals are paramount in the fight to reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America.
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/me...ny%20FINAL.pdf
WW
I want to emphasize the importance of individual initiative in reducing poverty and promoting economic success. My Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill and I have spent years emphasizing the importance of individual responsibility in reducing poverty and increasing opportunity. One of our arguments, based in part on a Brookings analysis of Census Bureau data, is that young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success – complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby. Based on an analysis of Census data, people who followed all three of these rules had only a 2 percent chance of being in poverty and a 72 percent chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 in 2010). These numbers were almost precisely reversed for people who violated all three rules, elevating their chance of being poor to 77 percent and reducing their chance of making the middle class to 4 percent.
Individual effort and good decisions about the big events in life are more important than government programs. Call it blaming the victim if you like, but decisions made by individuals are paramount in the fight to reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America.
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/me...ny%20FINAL.pdf
WW
07-26-2012, 08:29 AM
#24
Libertarian Resistance
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Joined APC: Feb 2007
Position: 757 FO
Posts: 1,057
another culprit
Harvard economists have proven one of the major theses of American Nightmare, which is that land-use regulation is a major cause of growing income inequality in the United States. By restricting labor mobility, the economists say, such regulation has played a “central role” in income disparities.
When measured on a state-by-state basis, American income inequality declined at a steady rate of 1.8 percent per year from 1880 to 1980. The slowing and reversal of this long-term trend after 1980 is startling. Not by coincidence, the states with the strongest land-use regulations–those on the Pacific Coast and in New England–began such regulation in the 1970s and 1980s.
Forty to 75 percent of the decline in inequality before 1880, the Harvard economists say, was due to migration of workers from low-income states to high-income states. The freedom to easily move faded after 1980 as many of the highest-income states used land-use regulation to make housing unaffordable to low-income workers. Average incomes in those states grew, leading them to congratulate themselves for attracting high-paid workers when what they were really doing is driving out low- and (in California, at least) middle-income workers.
As Virginia Postrel puts it, “the best-educated, most-affluent, most politically influential Americans like th[e] result” of economic segregation, because it “keeps out fat people with bad taste.” Postrel refers to these well-educated people as “elites,” but I simply call them “middle class.”
Middle class doesn’t mean middle income; it means people with managerial, creative, or other jobs that require thinking, not repetitive or physical labor. As a proxy, I use college education: less than 30 percent of working-age Americans have a bachelor’s degree or better. Though some people with college degrees flip burgers just as some without such degrees gained enough knowledge on the job to be promoted into management, it seems likely that about 30 percent of the population are middle- or upper-class while 70 percent are working- or lower-class.
Census data show that, in the late 1970s, the average worker with a high school diploma but no college education earned more than 64 percent as much as the average worker with a bachelor’s degree. By 2010, it was less than 53 percent.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the barrier between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is far more porous than the one between middle class and working class. The rising cost of higher education and the high cost of moving into regions with land-use regulation prevent less-educated people from bettering themselves. Increased regulation of commercial operations limit people’s ability to start small businesses. Increased traffic congestion (favored by “progressive” anti-auto cities) also hits working-class people harder than middle-class workers as the former are less likely to be able to take advantage of flex-time, telecommuting, and other ways of avoiding congestion.
Britain, which has regulated land use since 1947, is suffering many of the same problems. As the Telegraph reports, this regulation has divided “the nation between old and young, haves and have-nots.”
Of course, many urban planners still refuse to believe that land-use regulation makes housing expensive. Never mind the fact that economists at Harvard, Whartons, and a wide range of other universities agree that it does. Let’s just ignore the fact that such regulation is destroying our economy and oppressing low-income families. All that is important is that the middle-class elites who benefit are happy.
Yes, Land-Use Regulation Does Increase Income Inequality | Cato @ Liberty
When measured on a state-by-state basis, American income inequality declined at a steady rate of 1.8 percent per year from 1880 to 1980. The slowing and reversal of this long-term trend after 1980 is startling. Not by coincidence, the states with the strongest land-use regulations–those on the Pacific Coast and in New England–began such regulation in the 1970s and 1980s.
Forty to 75 percent of the decline in inequality before 1880, the Harvard economists say, was due to migration of workers from low-income states to high-income states. The freedom to easily move faded after 1980 as many of the highest-income states used land-use regulation to make housing unaffordable to low-income workers. Average incomes in those states grew, leading them to congratulate themselves for attracting high-paid workers when what they were really doing is driving out low- and (in California, at least) middle-income workers.
As Virginia Postrel puts it, “the best-educated, most-affluent, most politically influential Americans like th[e] result” of economic segregation, because it “keeps out fat people with bad taste.” Postrel refers to these well-educated people as “elites,” but I simply call them “middle class.”
Middle class doesn’t mean middle income; it means people with managerial, creative, or other jobs that require thinking, not repetitive or physical labor. As a proxy, I use college education: less than 30 percent of working-age Americans have a bachelor’s degree or better. Though some people with college degrees flip burgers just as some without such degrees gained enough knowledge on the job to be promoted into management, it seems likely that about 30 percent of the population are middle- or upper-class while 70 percent are working- or lower-class.
Census data show that, in the late 1970s, the average worker with a high school diploma but no college education earned more than 64 percent as much as the average worker with a bachelor’s degree. By 2010, it was less than 53 percent.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the barrier between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is far more porous than the one between middle class and working class. The rising cost of higher education and the high cost of moving into regions with land-use regulation prevent less-educated people from bettering themselves. Increased regulation of commercial operations limit people’s ability to start small businesses. Increased traffic congestion (favored by “progressive” anti-auto cities) also hits working-class people harder than middle-class workers as the former are less likely to be able to take advantage of flex-time, telecommuting, and other ways of avoiding congestion.
Britain, which has regulated land use since 1947, is suffering many of the same problems. As the Telegraph reports, this regulation has divided “the nation between old and young, haves and have-nots.”
Of course, many urban planners still refuse to believe that land-use regulation makes housing expensive. Never mind the fact that economists at Harvard, Whartons, and a wide range of other universities agree that it does. Let’s just ignore the fact that such regulation is destroying our economy and oppressing low-income families. All that is important is that the middle-class elites who benefit are happy.
Yes, Land-Use Regulation Does Increase Income Inequality | Cato @ Liberty
04-27-2013, 10:29 PM
#25
Libertarian Resistance
Thread Starter
Joined APC: Feb 2007
Position: 757 FO
Posts: 1,057
systemic?
"...I did my 3rd quarter grades today and it made me unreasonably angry. Our grades are all online throughout the year, so parents and kids can see their grades in every subject at all times. I give a few kinds of homework, but one standard weekly assignment in my advanced classes is 25 correct chesstempo.com problems every week. It's due Thursday; I check every Friday morning. Late problems get only half credit. It's fine to do them in advance, and the exact number of completed correct problems each kid needs to have for each Friday is written in a note to each week's assignment.
If you haven't experienced chesstempo.com, I use the site because it's free and it adjusts to each student's level. If you get a problem wrong, your rating goes down, and you are "paired" with an easier problem next. I make all my students start their handle with IS318, so it's relatively easy to check. I explain to them that working at these problems is one of the fastest ways to get better at chess.
I explain it's like going running: they have to work at it. I use the example that a runner could just get in a car and drive for five miles but say he went running, and people might believe him that time, but when the real race comes he's still going to be fat and out of shape. I say that chess is hard and you won't get better if you aren't willing to work and wrestle with the hard problems that aren't obvious to you right away.
So what happens? A significant percent of students just stop doing the assignment and fail my class as a consequence, despite weekly verbal and email reminders, even though they and their parents can see their grade decline each week. Even though they could sit down and do two hours of work at the beginning of each quarter and get an automatic 100 and never think about it again for 2 months.
Almost all of the kids do the problems by guessing as fast as possible, spending 10-15 seconds maximum because they know they will get an easier problem if they are wrong. Some of them go into settings and change the level from normal to easy, so each problem is a mate in 1, or its equivalent. Their ratings are generally 400-600 points lower than their actual ratings.
I gave all the nationals kids a tactics packet of harder problems to do in their week and a half spring break before nationals. I email the kids and their parents reminders to do the packet. More than half the kids don't do more than the first page. The ones who do more mostly just do the easiest problems, and write nonsense for the hard problems or write "castles" for every single answer. The best ones use Fritz to cheat, and I'm almost grateful that they even bothered. (I can tell the cheaters because if I take away their papers, they have no idea of any of the answers.)
I make online multiple choice quizzes, 10-20 diagrams each, for my students to test if they learned their openings. Each quiz has a practice module with exactly the same questions as the real test. You can do the practice as many times as you need to before taking the test, so you are practically guaranteed to get 100. A quarter of the students don't bother to take the test in the first place. Another quarter can't be bothered to do the practice, even though it gives you all the answers ahead of time, so they fail anyway.
Ten percent of my early morning students don't show up on any given day, and another ten percent are late almost every day..."
Elizabeth Spiegel's blog: depressing complaining rant
Tough to get ahead in life as an adult if you've got nothing to show for your education as a child.WW
If you haven't experienced chesstempo.com, I use the site because it's free and it adjusts to each student's level. If you get a problem wrong, your rating goes down, and you are "paired" with an easier problem next. I make all my students start their handle with IS318, so it's relatively easy to check. I explain to them that working at these problems is one of the fastest ways to get better at chess.
I explain it's like going running: they have to work at it. I use the example that a runner could just get in a car and drive for five miles but say he went running, and people might believe him that time, but when the real race comes he's still going to be fat and out of shape. I say that chess is hard and you won't get better if you aren't willing to work and wrestle with the hard problems that aren't obvious to you right away.
So what happens? A significant percent of students just stop doing the assignment and fail my class as a consequence, despite weekly verbal and email reminders, even though they and their parents can see their grade decline each week. Even though they could sit down and do two hours of work at the beginning of each quarter and get an automatic 100 and never think about it again for 2 months.
Almost all of the kids do the problems by guessing as fast as possible, spending 10-15 seconds maximum because they know they will get an easier problem if they are wrong. Some of them go into settings and change the level from normal to easy, so each problem is a mate in 1, or its equivalent. Their ratings are generally 400-600 points lower than their actual ratings.
I gave all the nationals kids a tactics packet of harder problems to do in their week and a half spring break before nationals. I email the kids and their parents reminders to do the packet. More than half the kids don't do more than the first page. The ones who do more mostly just do the easiest problems, and write nonsense for the hard problems or write "castles" for every single answer. The best ones use Fritz to cheat, and I'm almost grateful that they even bothered. (I can tell the cheaters because if I take away their papers, they have no idea of any of the answers.)
I make online multiple choice quizzes, 10-20 diagrams each, for my students to test if they learned their openings. Each quiz has a practice module with exactly the same questions as the real test. You can do the practice as many times as you need to before taking the test, so you are practically guaranteed to get 100. A quarter of the students don't bother to take the test in the first place. Another quarter can't be bothered to do the practice, even though it gives you all the answers ahead of time, so they fail anyway.
Ten percent of my early morning students don't show up on any given day, and another ten percent are late almost every day..."
Elizabeth Spiegel's blog: depressing complaining rant
Tough to get ahead in life as an adult if you've got nothing to show for your education as a child.WW
10-19-2013, 06:45 PM
#26
Libertarian Resistance
Thread Starter
Joined APC: Feb 2007
Position: 757 FO
Posts: 1,057
Income Redistribution
An excerpt:
While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the "savings" they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations. That's because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.
Read the whole thing here:
The Weekend Interview with Stanley Druckenmiller: How Washington Really Redistributes Income - WSJ.com
WW
While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the "savings" they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations. That's because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.
Read the whole thing here:
The Weekend Interview with Stanley Druckenmiller: How Washington Really Redistributes Income - WSJ.com
WW
10-19-2013, 08:32 PM
#27
Bracing for Fallacies
Joined APC: Jul 2007
Position: In favor of good things, not in favor of bad things
Posts: 3,543
Originally Posted by Winged Wheeler
An excerpt:
While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the "savings" they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations. That's because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.
Read the whole thing here:
The Weekend Interview with Stanley Druckenmiller: How Washington Really Redistributes Income - WSJ.com
WW
While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the "savings" they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations. That's because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.
Read the whole thing here:
The Weekend Interview with Stanley Druckenmiller: How Washington Really Redistributes Income - WSJ.com
WW
11-01-2013, 08:27 AM
#28
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Nov 2013
Posts: 854
While I am not a strict determinist, I found that this book has an interesting big-picture view about historical cycles of income inequality: War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires: Peter Turchin: 9780452288195: Amazon.com: Books
Not sure how to sum up such a dense book succinctly, but here goes: throughout history empires have grown in similar ways, and aged and eventually disintegrated in similar ways-- additionally, they have tended to go through "secular cycles" of, among other things, wealth disparity. Perhaps only somewhat related to the OP, but close enough. Looks for ultimate causes instead of the proximate causes discussed above. Not a light read, but I enjoyed it.
Not sure how to sum up such a dense book succinctly, but here goes: throughout history empires have grown in similar ways, and aged and eventually disintegrated in similar ways-- additionally, they have tended to go through "secular cycles" of, among other things, wealth disparity. Perhaps only somewhat related to the OP, but close enough. Looks for ultimate causes instead of the proximate causes discussed above. Not a light read, but I enjoyed it.
11-01-2013, 04:25 PM
#29
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Sep 2007
Position: 777 Captain in Training
Posts: 1,457
Originally Posted by HotMamaPilot
Although this will probably be deleted before I strike the submit key, and an infraction is already in my mailbox, I'm gonna say it anyway.
Mind you, this is not a racists comment: illegal immigrants are contributing to the inequality of wealth. By working for sub-standard wages, they are creating their own lower class while fattening up the wallets of business owners saving on labor costs. Wanna know what happend to the middle class? They've been outbid. Oh sure, you can say that illegals only do "jobs that other americans won't do". Hogwash! Take the lawn cutting business; it could be a good union job and help put cash into american families' pockets. But non-union workers, that should not be here in the first place, have worked for much less. I could go on, but I think I'm writing what most (with a brain) already know. Btw, I am pro-immigration. LEGAL immigration.
Mind you, this is not a racists comment: illegal immigrants are contributing to the inequality of wealth. By working for sub-standard wages, they are creating their own lower class while fattening up the wallets of business owners saving on labor costs. Wanna know what happend to the middle class? They've been outbid. Oh sure, you can say that illegals only do "jobs that other americans won't do". Hogwash! Take the lawn cutting business; it could be a good union job and help put cash into american families' pockets. But non-union workers, that should not be here in the first place, have worked for much less. I could go on, but I think I'm writing what most (with a brain) already know. Btw, I am pro-immigration. LEGAL immigration.
11-02-2013, 05:45 PM
#30
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Nov 2013
Posts: 854
A link discussing wealth inequality throughout human history:
Peter Turchin ? The history of inequality
Peter Turchin ? The history of inequality
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