Economist's View

New Evidence that Unions Raise Wages for Less-Skilled Workers

From Steve Maas at the NBER:

New Evidence that Unions Raise Wages for Less-Skilled Workers: Tapping into eight decades of private and public surveys, a new study finds evidence that unions have historically reduced income inequality.

For Unions and Inequality over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data (NBER Working Paper No. 24587), Henry S. Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu assembled a household-level database on union membership dating back to 1936.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census has tracked wages and education consistently since 1940. Aggregate data on union membership goes back to the early 20th century, but data on individual workers were not readily available until the Census Bureau started asking about union affiliation in 1973. By that time, unions were already in decline, and higher-skilled workers accounted for an increasing share of their membership.

The researchers draw on more than 500 surveys conducted by Gallup and other pollsters from 1936 through 1986, extending their dataset into the present day with information from government surveys and other sources.

Their study finds that the salary premium for union members compared to workers with comparable skills and demographic characteristics has remained relatively steady over the last 80 years despite large swings both in the overall number of union members and in their education levels. The less skilled the workers were, the greater the wage premium associated with their union membership. The researchers find a negative correlation between unionization rates and measures of inequality such as the Gini coefficient.

Between 1940 to 1970, when unionization peaked and income inequality narrowed, unions were drawing in the least-skilled workers. Before and after that period, unions were smaller and a higher fraction of their members were drawn from the ranks of high-skill workers. The 1940 - 1970 period also coincided with the highest share of union members drawn from minority groups.

The clear implication of the researchers' analysis is that, because unions offer a larger wage premium to less-skilled workers, unions have an important equalizing effect on the income distribution to the extent that they are successful in organizing the less-skilled. Recent decades have seen growth in educational attainment in the workforce, and, importantly, not only has the overall share of workers who are unionized declined, but unions have also become relatively less successful in organizing less-skilled workers. The remaining unionized workforce is more highly educated than it was earlier. The combination of the declining presence of unions in the labor market and the increased skill level of the remaining union workers means that the important equalizing effect of unions on the income distribution that was seen in the middle of the 20th century has diminished substantially.

Rulers of the World: Read Karl Marx!

From The Economist:

Rulers of the world: read Karl Marx!: ...The chief reason for the continuing interest in Marx, however, is that his ideas are more relevant than they have been for decades. The post-war consensus that shifted power from capital to labour and produced a “great compression” in living standards is fading. Globalisation and the rise of a virtual economy are producing a version of capitalism that once more seems to be out of control. The backwards flow of power from labour to capital is finally beginning to produce a popular—and often populist—reaction. No wonder the most successful economics book of recent years, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, echoes the title of Marx’s most important work and his preoccupation with inequality. ...

Race, and the Race Between Stocks and Homes

"Black-white economic inequality remains large and persistent, and recent wealth inequality trends for all Americans are explained by assets, not income":

Race, and the race between stocks and homes, by Douglas Clement, The Region: Most research on long-term U.S. inequality focuses on income; relatively little examines wealth, largely due to lack of good asset data. But a June 2018 working paper from the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute addresses that imbalance with a new data set developed from historical surveys, and it shows that wealth—specifically, ownership of stocks and homes—has been a central force behind U.S. inequality trends for 70 years.

...Their analysis begins by confirming the findings of other scholars: increased income polarization since the 1970s, with particular damage to the relative position of the middle-class. It also sheds new light on economic inequality between blacks and whites by quantifying vast differences in wealth as well as income, and no progress in diminishing those gaps.

Perhaps the study’s most novel contribution, however, is in revealing the singular role of household portfolio composition—ownership of different asset types—in determining inequality trends. Because the primary source of middle-class American wealth is homeownership, and the main asset holding of the top 10 percent is equity, the relative prices of the two assets have set the path for wealth distribution and driven a wedge between the evolution of income and wealth.

In brief, as home prices climbed from 1950 until the mid-2000s, middle-class wealth held its own relative to upper-class wealth even as middle-class incomes stagnated. But after the financial crisis, the stock market’s quick recovery and slow turnaround of housing prices meant soaring wealth inequality that even exceeded the last decade’s climb in income inequality. ...

Racial inequality: “The overall summary is bleak”

The demographic detail and 70-year span of the new database also permitted close analysis of racial inequality, pre- and post-civil rights eras. The picture is discouraging. Income disparities are as large now as in 1950, with black household income still just half that of white households.

The racial gap in wealth is even wider, and similarly stagnant. The median black household has less than 11 percent the wealth of the median white household (about $15,000 versus $140,000 in 2016 prices). The economists also find that the financial crisis hit black households particularly hard.

“The overall summary is bleak,” they write. “Over seven decades, next to no progress has been made in closing the black-white income gap. The racial wealth gap is equally persistent. … The typical black household remains poorer than 80% of white households.”

The race between stocks and homes

To explain the divergent trends in income and wealth inequality before the crisis, the economists draw on a key strength of the database: It includes both income and wealth information, household-by-household, and 70 years of balance sheets with detailed portfolio composition.

With this, they find that the bottom 50 percent now holds little or negative wealth (that is, debt), and its share dropped from 3 percent of total wealth in 1950 to 1.2 percent in 2016.

For the upper half, portfolio diversification determines wealth trends. The data show that homes are the primary asset for households between the 50th and the 90th percentile, while the upper 10th also owns a large share of equities. Therefore, middle-class household wealth is strongly exposed to house price fluctuation, and the top 10 percent is more sensitive to stock market variations.

This difference in asset holdings explains how, prior to the crisis, middle-class households experienced rising wealth in parallel with the top 10th, even though their real incomes stagnated and savings were negligible. But the picture changed dramatically post-crisis. In “a race between the stock market and the housing market,” the economists write, the richest 10 percent, by virtue of a climbing stock market, enjoyed soaring post-crisis wealth, while average household wealth largely stagnated. (See figure.)

“When house prices collapsed in the 2008 crisis,” the economists conclude, the “leveraged portfolio position of the middle class brought about substantial wealth losses, while the quick rebound in stock markets boosted wealth at the top. Relative price changes between houses and equities after 2007 have produced the largest spike in wealth inequality in postwar American history.”

Employer Concentration and Stagnant Wages

From the NBER Digest. "Two studies suggest that an increase in employers' monopsony power is associated with lower wages.":

Employer Concentration and Stagnant Wages: Stagnant wages and a declining share of labor income in GDP in recent decades have spawned a number of explanations. These include outsourcing, foreign competition, automation, and the decline of unions. Two new studies focus on another factor that may have affected the relative bargaining position of workers and firms: employer domination of local job markets. One shows that wage growth slowed as industrial consolidation increased over the past 40 years; the other shows that in many job markets across the country there is little competition for workers in specific job categories.

In Strong Employers and Weak Employees: How Does Employer Concentration Affect Wages? (NBER Working Paper No. 24307), Efraim Benmelech, Nittai Bergman, and Hyunseob Kim analyzed county-level census data for industrial firms for the period 1977 to 2009 to study the impact of employer concentration on wages in local labor markets. By focusing on manufacturing, they were able to control directly for worker productivity. The researchers found that, although there was substantial cross-sectional and time series variation in concentration, average local-level employer concentration increased between 1977-81 and 2002-9, based on the Standard Industrial Classification four-digit code for industry groups. Their measure of concentration is the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), which is defined as the sum of the squares of the employment shares for all of the firms in a given industry. The employment-weighted mean value of this index rose from 0.698 to 0.756 during the study period, an increase of 5.8 percent. Forty percent of the plant-year observations were associated with manufacturing facilities in counties dominated by just a few firms. The researchers found a negative relationship between employer concentration and wages; it was twice as strong in the second half of their data sample as in the first half; a one standard deviation increase in the HHI was associated with a wage reduction of between 1 and 2 percent. They estimate that a firm operating in a labor market in which it was the only employer would pay wages 3.1 percent lower than those of a firm that operated in a less concentrated market. Most of the decline in wages appeared to occur as labor markets approached the pure monopsony case, namely the situation in which only one firm is hiring workers. In addition to finding lower wages in monopsony markets, the researchers also found that, over time, firms that dominate their labor markets were less likely to share productivity gains with employees. A one standard deviation decline in the HHI mapped to an increase in the elasticity of wages with respect to productivity of about 25 percent, from 0.38 to 0.47. Over the course of the study period, U.S. imports from China increased. The researchers found that import competition from China, which was associated with the closure or relocation of plants in a number of industries, accelerated the trend toward greater employer concentration in some local labor markets. This finding suggests that import competition not only reduced the demand for workers who previously produced the now-imported products, but that it may also have depressed wages for workers in other industries in affected labor markets as a result of increased labor market concentration. The only employees who did not experience wage stagnation in markets with high plant concentration were those who belonged to unions. About one quarter of the plants studied were unionized; the fraction was lower in the later than in the earlier years. Because this study focuses on workers employed by industrial firms, the fraction of workers who are union members is higher than for the U.S. labor market more broadly. To assess the robustness of their results, the researchers compared plants in the same industry owned by the same company but operating in different locations; they found that "those located in a more concentrated local labor market pay significantly lower wages."

In Concentration in U.S. Labor Markets: Evidence from Online Vacancy Data (NBER Working Paper No. 24395), José A. Azar, Ioana Marinescu, Marshall I. Steinbaum, and Bledi Taska found that in most locations employers have substantial monopsony power. The researchers studied job vacancies in the 709 federally delineated commuting zones, which depict the bounds of local economies. Drawing on a database compiled by Burning Glass Technologies from 40,000 employment websites, they calculated the level of labor market concentration by commuting zone, occupation, and quarter for the year 2016. They selected the top 200 occupations as classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' six-digit code, capturing 90 percent of the job postings in the database. As a yardstick for labor market concentration, the study calculated the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index measure, similar to the application in Working Paper 24307. The results suggested that the higher the market concentration, the stronger an employer's bargaining position. The average market had the equivalent of 2.5 recruiting employers. Under the standards that federal antitrust officials use when determining whether product markets exhibit excessive levels of concentration, 54 percent of the markets were highly concentrated, meaning they had the equivalent of fewer than four firms recruiting employees. Eleven percent of markets were moderately concentrated, and only 35 percent had low concentration. Nationwide, among the 30 largest occupations, marketing managers, web developers, and financial analysts faced the least favorable job markets; markets were most favorable for registered nurses, tractor-trailer drivers, and customer service representatives. The actual picture for job seekers, however, was brighter than these figures would indicate because commuting zones vary widely in employment levels. Commuting zones encompassing large cities had lower levels of labor market concentration than those around small cities or in rural areas. Accounting for the unequal distribution of employment, the researchers found that 23 percent of the national workforce is in highly or moderately concentrated labor markets. They argue that traditional market concentration thresholds underestimate workers' loss of bargaining power over time. They point out that those thresholds are geared to gauging the impact of mergers on the consumer marketplace, and that while consumers can buy products without the producers' explicit agreement, workers must find employers who agree to hire them.

On the Link between US Pay and Productivity

Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers at VoxEU:

On the link between US pay and productivity, by Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers, VoxEU: Pay growth for middle class workers in the US has been abysmal over recent decades – in real terms, median hourly compensation rose only 11% between 1973 and 2016.¹ At the same time, hourly labour productivity has grown steadily, rising by 75%.

This divergence between productivity and the typical worker’s pay is a relatively recent phenomenon. Using production/nonsupervisory compensation as a proxy for median compensation (since there are no data on the median before 1973), Bivens and Mishel (2015) show that typical compensation and productivity grew at the same rate over 1948-1973, and only began to diverge in 1973 (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Labour productivity, average compensation, and production/nonsupervisory compensation 1948-2016

Notes: Labour productivity: total economy real output per hour (constructed from BLS and BEA data). Average compensation: total economy compensation per hour (constructed from BLS data). Production/nonsupervisory compensation: real compensation per hour, production and nonsupervisory workers (Economic Policy Institute).

What does this stark divergence imply about the relationship between productivity and typical compensation? Since productivity growth has been so much faster than median pay growth, the question is how much does productivity growth benefit the typical worker?²

A number of authors have raised these questions in recent years. Harold Meyerson, for example, wrote in American Prospect in 2014 that “for the vast majority of American workers, the link between their productivity and their compensation no longer exists”, and the Economist wrote in 2013 that “unless you are rich, GDP growth isn't doing much to raise your income anymore”. Bernstein (2015) raises the concern that “[f]aster productivity growth would be great. I’m just not at all sure we can count on it to lift middle-class incomes.” Bivens and Mishel (2015) write “although boosting productivity growth is an important long-run goal, this will not lead to broad-based wage gains unless we pursue policies that reconnect productivity growth and the pay of the vast majority”.

Has typical compensation delinked from productivity?

Figure 1 appears to suggest that a one-to-one relationship between productivity and typical compensation existed before 1973, and that this relationship broke down after 1973. On the other hand, just as two time series apparently growing in tandem does not mean that one causes the other, two series diverging may not mean that the causal link between the two has broken down. Rather, other factors may have come into play which appear to have severed the connection between productivity and typical compensation.

As such there is a spectrum of possibilities for the true underlying relationship between productivity and typical compensation. On one end of the spectrum – which we call ‘strong delinkage’ – it’s possible that factors are blocking the transmission mechanism from productivity to typical compensation, such that increases in productivity don’t feed through to pay. At the opposite end of the spectrum – which we call ‘strong linkage’ – it’s possible that productivity growth translates fully into increases in typical workers’ pay, but even as productivity growth has been acting to raise pay, other factors (orthogonal to productivity) have been acting to reduce it. Between these two ends of the spectrum is a range of possibilities where some degree of linkage or delinkage exists between productivity and typical compensation.

In a recent paper, we estimate which point on this linkage-delinkage spectrum best describes the productivity-typical compensation relationship (Stansbury and Summers 2017). Using medium-term fluctuations in productivity growth, we test the relationship between productivity growth and two key measures of typical compensation growth: median compensation, and average compensation for production and nonsupervisory workers.

Simply plotting the annual growth rates of productivity and our two measures of typical compensation (Figure 2) suggests support for quite substantial linkage – the series seem to move together, although typical compensation growth is almost always lower.

Figure 2 Change in log productivity and typical compensation, three-year moving average

Notes: Data from BLS, BEA and Economic Policy Institute. Series are three-year backward-looking moving averages of change in log variable.

Making use of the high frequency changes in productivity growth over one- to five-year periods, we run a series of regressions to test this link more rigorously. We find that periods of higher productivity growth are associated with substantially higher growth in median and production/nonsupervisory worker compensation – even during the period since 1973, where productivity and typical compensation have diverged so much in levels. A one percentage point increase in the growth rate of productivity has been associated with between two-thirds and one percentage point higher growth in median worker compensation in the period since 1973, and with between 0.4 and 0.7 percentage points higher growth in production/nonsupervisory worker compensation. These results suggest that there is substantial linkage between productivity and median compensation (even the strong linkage view cannot be rejected), and that there is a significant degree of linkage between productivity and production/nonsupervisory worker compensation.

How is it possible to find this relationship when productivity has clearly grown so much faster than median workers’ pay? Our findings imply that even as productivity growth has been acting to push workers’ pay up, other factors not associated with productivity growth have acted to push workers’ pay down. So while it may appear on first glance that productivity growth has not benefited typical workers much, our findings imply that if productivity growth had been lower, typical workers would have likely done substantially worse.

If the link between productivity and pay hasn’t broken, what has happened?

The productivity-median compensation divergence can be broken down into two aspects of rising inequality: the rise in top-half income inequality (divergence between mean and median compensation) which began around 1973, and the fall in the labour share (divergence between productivity and mean compensation) which began around 2000.

For both of these phenomena, technological change is often invoked as the primary cause. Computerisation and automation have been put forward as causes of rising mean-median income inequality (e.g. Autor et al. 1998, Acemoglu and Restrepo 2017); and automation, falling prices of investment goods, and rapid labour-augmenting technological change have been put forward as causes of the fall in the labour share (e.g. Karabarbounis and Neiman 2014, Acemoglu and Restrepo 2016, Brynjolffson and McAfee 2014, Lawrence 2015).

At the same time, non-purely technological hypotheses for rising mean-median inequality include the race between education and technology (Goldin and Katz 2007), declining unionisation (Freeman et al. 2016), globalisation (Autor et al. 2013), immigration (Borjas 2003), and the ‘superstar effect’ (Rosen 1981, Gabaix et al. 2016). Non-technological hypotheses for the falling labour share include labour market institutions (Levy and Temin 2007, Mishel and Bivens 2015), market structure and monopoly power (Autor et al. 2017, Barkai 2017), capital accumulation (Piketty 2014, Piketty and Zucman 2014), and the productivity slowdown itself (Grossman et al. 2017).

While we do not analyse these theories in detail, a simple empirical test can help distinguish the relative importance of these two categories of explanation – purely technology-based or not – for rising mean-median inequality and the falling labour share. More rapid technological progress should cause faster productivity growth – so, if some aspect of faster technological progress has caused inequality, we should see periods of faster productivity growth come alongside more rapid growth in inequality.

We find very little evidence for this. Our regressions find no significant relationship between productivity growth and changes in mean-median inequality, and very little relationship between productivity growth and changes in the labour share. In addition, as Table 1 shows, the two periods of slower productivity growth (1973-1996 and 2003-2014) were associated with faster growth in inequality (an increasing mean/median ratio and a falling labour share).

Taken together, this evidence casts doubt on the idea that more rapid technological progress alone has been the primary driver of rising inequality over recent decades, and tends to lend support to more institutional and structural explanations.

Table 1 Average annual growth rates of productivity, the labour share and the mean/median ratio during the US’ productivity booms and productivity slowdowns

Note: Data from BLS, Penn World Tables, EPI Data Library.

Policy implications

The slow growth in median workers’ pay and the large and persistent rise in inequality are extremely concerning on grounds of both welfare and equity. There are important ongoing debates about the factors responsible for this phenomenon, and what must be done to reverse it.

Our contribution to these debates is, we believe, to demonstrate that productivity growth still matters substantially for middle income Americans. If productivity accelerates for reasons relating to technology or to policy, the likely impact will be increased pay growth for the typical worker.

We can use our estimates to calculate a rough counterfactual. If the ratio of the mean to median worker's hourly compensation in 2016 had been the same as it was in 1973, and mean compensation remained at its 2016 level, the median worker's pay would have been around 33% higher. If the ratio of labour productivity to mean compensation in 2016 had been the same as it was in 1973 (i.e. the labour share had not fallen), the average and median worker would both have had 4-8% more hourly compensation all else constant. Assuming our estimated relationship between compensation and productivity holds, if productivity growth had been as fast over 1973-2016 as it was over 1949-1973, median and mean compensation would have been around 41% higher in 2016, holding other factors constant.

This suggests that the potential effect of raising productivity growth on the average American’s pay may be as great as the effect of policies to reverse trends in income inequality – and that a continued productivity slowdown should be a major concern for those hoping for increases in real compensation for middle income workers.

This does not mean that policy should ignore questions of redistribution or labour market intervention – the evidence of the past four decades demonstrates that productivity growth alone is not necessarily enough to raise real incomes substantially, particularly in the face of strong downward pressures on pay. However it does mean that policy should not focus on these issues to the exclusion of productivity growth – strategies that focus both on productivity growth and on policies to promote inclusion are likely to have the greatest impact on the living standards of middle-income Americans.

References

Acemoglu, D and P Restrepo (2017), "Robots and jobs: Evidence from US labour markets", NBER Working Paper 23285.

Acemoglu, D and P Restrepo (2016), “The race between machine and man: Implications of technology for growth, factor shares and employment”, NBER, Working Paper 22252.

Autor, D, D Dorn, L F Katz, C Patterson and J Van Reenen (2017), “The fall of the labour share and the rise of superstar firms”, CEPR Discussion Paper 12041.

Autor, D, D Dorn and G H Hanson (2013), "The China syndrome: Local labour market effects of import competition in the United States", American Economic Review 103(6): 2121-2168.

Autor, D, L F Katz and A B Krueger (1998), "Computing inequality: Have computers changed the labour market?"  Quarterly Journal of Economics 113(4): 1169-1213.

Barkai, S (2016), "Declining labour and capital shares", Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, New Working Paper Series 2.

Bernstein, J (2015), “Faster productivity growth would be great. I’m just not sure we can count on it to lift middle class incomes”, On the Economy Blog, 21 April.

Bivens, J and L Mishel (2015), “Understanding the historic divergence between productivity and a typical worker's pay: Why it matters and why it's real", Economic Policy Institute, Washington DC.

Borjas, G J (2003), “The labour demand curve is downward sloping: Reexamining the impact of immigration on the labour market”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(4): 1335-1374.

Brynjolfsson, E and A McAfee (2014), The second machine age: Work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies, WW Norton & Company.

The Economist (2015), “Inequality: A defining issue – for poor people”, Economist Blog – Democracy in America, 16 December.

Elsby, M, B Hobijn and A Şahin (2013), "The decline of the US labour share", Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2013(2): 1-63.

Feldstein, M (2008), “Did wages reflect growth in productivity?" Journal of Policy Modeling 30(4): 591-594.

Freeman, R B, E Han, B Duke, D Madland (2016), “How does declining unionism affect the American middle class and inter-generational mobility?”, Federal Reserve Bank, 2015 Community Development Research Conference Publication.

Gabaix, X, J‐M Lasry, P‐L Lions and B Moll (2016), "The dynamics of inequality", Econometrica 84(6): 2071-2111.

Goldin, C D, and L F Katz (2009), The race between education and technology, Harvard University Press.

Grossman, G M, E Helpman, E Oberfield and T Sampson (2017), “The productivity slowdown and the declining labour share: A neoclassical exploration”, NBER, Working Paper No 23853.

Karabarbounis, L and B Neiman (2014), “The global decline of the labour share", Quarterly Journal of Economics 129(1): 61-103.

Lawrence, R Z (2015), “Recent declines in labour's share in US income: A preliminary neoclassical account", NBER Working Paper No w21296.

Lawrence, R Z (2016), “Does productivity still determine worker compensation? Domestic and international evidence”, in The US Labour Market: Questions and Challenges for Public Policy, American Enterprise Institute Press.

Levy, F and P Temin (2007), "Inequality and institutions in 20th century America", NBER Working Paper 13106

Meyerson, H (2014), “How to raise Americans’ wages”, The American Prospect, 18 March.

Piketty, T (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Piketty, T and G Zucman (2014), “Capital is back: Wealth-income ratios in rich countries 1700–2010”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 129(3): 1255–1310.

Stansbury, A and L Summers (2017), “Productivity and pay: Is the link broken?”, NBER, Working Paper 24165.

Endnotes

[1] As measured using the CPI-U-RS consumer price deflator. Using the PCE consumer price deflator, median compensation has risen by about 26% over the period rather than 12%. We use the Economic Policy Institute’s measure of median compensation, which they calculate from median wages (BLS) and the average wage-total compensation ratio (BEA NIPA).

[2] Note that we focus in this column on the divergence of median or typical pay from average productivity. The divergence of average compensation from average productivity – equivalent to the declining labour share – has been smaller and more recent. Analyses of the average compensation-average productivity divergence can be found in Feldstein (2008), Lawrence (2016) and our recent paper (Stansbury and Summers 2017).

Angus Deaton on the Under-Discussed Driver of Inequality in America: “It’s Easier for Rent-Seekers to Affect Policy Here Than In Much of Europe”

"In an interview with ProMarket, Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton talks about the connection of rent-seeking and monopolization to rising inequality":

Angus Deaton on the Under-Discussed Driver of Inequality in America: “It’s Easier for Rent-Seekers to Affect Policy Here Than In Much of Europe”: In December, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, embarked on a coast-to-coast tour of the United States. Alston’s fact-finding mission, conducted at the invitation of the federal government, resulted in a grim report that declared the US “the world champion of extreme inequality” and highlighted the vast inequities that plague American society: The US is one of the world’s wealthiest countries, yet 40 million of its inhabitants live in poverty, its infant mortality rates are the highest among developed nations, and Americans lead “shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy.” The US also has the lowest rate of social mobility of any rich country, rapidly turning the American Dream—its national ethos—to “an American illusion.”

Rising inequality has been the focus of countless articles, books and debates in recent years, as more and more empirical studies show that in the decades since 1980, income gains have gone overwhelmingly to the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent. Much of the debate, however, is concerned with the implications of inequality: Does rising inequality negatively affect economic growth? Does it undermine democracy? Did it contribute to the rise of populist politics in America and around the developed world?

Those, says Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton, are the wrong questions to ask if we wish to understand inequality. In fact, he suggested in a recent piece for Project Syndicate, it’s possible that the term “inequality” itself might be ill-fitting. A better term might be “unfairness”: Inequality, he argued, is the consequence of economic, political, and social processes—some good, some bad, and some very bad. The key to addressing its rapid increase is to address the processes that can be deemed “unfair.”

Examples are plenty. In his piece, Deaton focuses on several processes and policies that have allowed the rich to get richer while holding down middle- and working-class wages. Among them: rising health care costs, market consolidation, diminishing labor power, and corporations’ political power. These processes do not stem from “unstoppable processes” like technology or globalization, argues Deaton, but are the result of rent-seeking. 

Deaton, the recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics, is one of the world’s foremost experts on inequality. The groundbreaking research on US mortality rates he conducted together with Anne Case revealed an increase in midlife mortality rates among white non-Hispanic Americans, led by death related to drugs, alcohol and suicide—what they called “deaths of despair.”

To better understand the connection between inequality and rent-seeking in America, we spoke with Deaton, a Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. In his interview with ProMarket, Deaton discussed the connection of rent-seeking and monopolization to rising inequality, and explained why he believes it’s easier for rent-seekers to influence policy in the US than in Europe. ...[continue]...

The Housing Market Crash and Wealth Inequality in the U.S.

From the NBER Digest:

The Housing Market Crash and Wealth Inequality in the U.S., by Jen Deaderick, NBER Digest: Middle-class households tend to be heavily leveraged, with their homes as primary assets, while the rich tend to have more diverse investments. This made the middle class particularly vulnerable to the housing market crash.

Wealth inequality in the U.S. rose steeply between 2007 to 2010, largely as a result of the sharp decline in house prices during that period, Edward N. Wolff reports in Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2016: Has Middle Class Wealth Recovered? (NBER Working Paper No. 24085). Households with a greater concentration of wealth in their homes — including younger households, African Americans, and Hispanics — fared worse than other groups. The decline in home prices had a far greater percentage impact on the net worth of the middle class than the stock market plunge had on net worth of the top 1 percent.

The study draws on data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which was conducted eleven times between the years 1983 and 2016. It defines wealth as net worth — the current value of all marketable assets minus any outstanding debts. This wealth measure excludes the future value of Social Security benefits and defined benefit pension payments. Median net worth declined from $118,600 in 2007 to $66,500 in 2010. Mean net worth, which is more sensitive to the holdings of high net worth households, declined from $620,500 to $521,000 — a drop of 16 percent. By 2016, median net worth had rebounded to $78,100, while mean net worth had reached $667,600, surpassing its 2007 value.

The rich tend to have a more diverse range of investments than the middle class, making them less vulnerable to declines in particular asset categories. The middle class tends to be heavily leveraged, with their homes as primary assets. As a result, they were disproportionately affected by the housing crash. Median wealth fell more than house prices from 2007 to 2010.

The study also reports the average return on all investments for households in different strata of the wealth distribution. For the period 1983-2016, "the average annual return on gross assets for the top 1 percent was 0.57 percentage points greater than that of the next 19 percent and 1.44 percentage points greater than that of the middle quintiles." This return differential, which contributes to greater wealth accumulation by those in higher wealth categories, is largely due to greater weight on owner-occupied housing in the asset holdings of the middle class, and a higher weight on corporate stocks — historically a high return asset class — in the portfolios of the wealthiest households.

The racial divide in wealth-holding widened with the housing crisis. In 2007, the ratio of debt to net worth in African-American households averaged 0.553, as opposed to 0.154 for white households. The ratio of mortgage debt to home value was also greater for African-American households: 0.49 compared with 0.32. The greater leverage made the relative loss in home equity after the housing crash far greater for African-American households. Hispanic households were even harder hit, as many bought homes at high prices between 2001 and 2007 in states that saw particularly steep drops in home prices. Both African-Americans and Hispanics recovered fairly well after the Great Recession, though not quite to their 2007 levels.

The study also notes a significant reduction in the relative wealth of the young versus the old during the Great Recession. "The average wealth of the youngest age group [households headed by someone under the age of 35] collapsed almost in half, from $105,500 in 2007 to $57,000 in 2010 (measured in 2016 USD), its second lowest point over the 30-year period ...while the relative wealth of age group 35-44 shrank from $357,400 to $217,600, its lowest point over the whole 1983 to 2010 period." This may be the result of younger households having bought homes at peak housing prices. The wealth of older age groups declined by less during this period.

Exploring the Job Ladder to High-Productivity Firms

"Less-educated workers are disproportionately likely to move up the job ladder during expansions, but they also slide down during downturns."

This is from Dwyer Gunn at the NBER Digest:

Exploring the Job Ladder to High-Productivity Firms, NBER Digest: Upward movement of workers on a "job ladder" from low-productivity to high-productivity firms is heavily dependent on the business cycle. During booms, net employment at high-productivity firms grows faster than at low-productivity firms, resulting in workers moving up the ladder. During busts, these upward job-to-job changes essentially stop. Net employment flows are instead driven by layoffs, with low-productivity firms losing comparatively more workers than their higher-productivity counterparts.

In Who Moves Up the Job Ladder? (NBER Working Paper No. 23693), John Haltiwanger, Henry Hyatt, and Erika McEntarfer examine demographic patterns in job ladder mobility over the business cycle. Using several datasets from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, they analyze earnings, employment, productivity, and demographic data for 65 percent of the national private sector workforce for the years 1998–2011. Their analysis relies on firm productivity data for a shorter period, 2003–11.

The researchers find that younger workers are disproportionately likely to climb the ladder by moving to more productive firms. Workers under 25, for example, account for only 16 percent of the workforce but 37 percent of the outflows from low-productivity firms and 29 percent of the inflows to high-productivity firms.

Less-educated work­ers also are disproportionately likely to move up the job ladder during expansions. More-educated workers are less likely to enter employment at low-productivity firms in the first place, but once in such firms they are less likely to separate from them. The researchers hypothesize that more-educated workers may be more specialized, and thus less mobile across firms.

The positive rate of job ladder mobility for younger and less-educated workers is not observed during tough economic times. During contractions, younger and less-educated individuals who are unemployed or out of the labor force are less likely to be hired at all. If working, they are less likely to move up the job ladder to more productive firms, and they are more likely to be knocked off the ladder entirely as a result of job loss. Economic slowdowns, while imposing costs throughout the labor market, are particularly harmful to the employment prospects of younger, less-educated workers.

The researchers note that much of the previous research on the consequences of labor market dynamics during a recession has focused on college graduates, and they suggest that more attention should be paid to the long-term effects on less-educated workers. Because mobility up the job ladder plays a particularly important role in the career paths of younger, less-educated workers, labor market frictions may play an important role in explaining wage differentials between them. In particular, the declining fluidity of the labor market, which has been recently noted, may make it more difficult to climb the job ladder.

The Rise and Future of Progressive Redistribution

Peter Lindert at VoxEU:

The rise and future of progressive redistribution, by Peter Lindert: What have governments done to shift national income towards the poor at the expense of those better off? The question deserves a global history, especially in the wake of the disturbing rise in inequality since the 1970s (Atkinson and Morelli 2014). This column’s steps towards a global history of government income redistribution yields the following findings:

• Government budgets have shifted resources progressively, from the rich to the poor, within the last 100 years. The middle ranks are neither favoured nor disfavoured. Before WWI, very little was redistributed through government.
• The shift toward progressivity has not been reversed, contrary to allegations of a rightward shift since the 1970s. Among democratic welfare states, the closest thing to a demonstrable reversal was Sweden’s partial retreat since the 1980s. Globally, the most dramatic swing has been Chile’s record-setting return towards progressivity after the regressivity under Pinochet.
• As a corollary, the rise in inequality since the 1970s owes nothing to a net shift in government redistribution toward the rich, despite the lowering of top tax rates.
• Since the late 1970s, several governments have shown a mission drift away from investing in lower-income children and working-age adults, while concentrating social insurance on the elderly. Japan, the US, and some Mediterranean countries have missed an opportunity for pro-growth income-levelling.

What triggers the new history is the 2016-2017 blossoming of research programmes on fiscal incidence by income class, led by Bengtsson et al. (2016), the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) project (Lustig 2017), the OECD (2011, 2016, forthcoming), and the Distributional National Accounting (DINA) project (Piketty et al. 2016). After combining and extending these, I have added century-long histories for Britain and South American countries (Lindert 2017).

The recent research on government redistribution has concentrated on the 21st century. Combining the latest snapshots from the CEQ and OECD projects yields the group photo of 53 countries around 2013 shown in Figure 1.¹ The progressivity of government fiscal redistribution is measured by the gap between the Gini coefficient of inequality in market, or ‘pre-fisc’, income and the Gini coefficient for final, or ‘post-fisc’, income. That gap shows up in Figure 1 as the distance between the 45-degree line and the country’s dot. That gap is smallest for Mexico, and largest for Ireland.

Figure 1 Income inequality and progressivity in 53 countries, c2013

All 53 data-supplying governments redistribute progressively today, placing their dots below the 45-degree line. Probably many other countries do as well, though there may be some who silently redistribute regressively, from households at the bottom to those at the top (North Korea, maybe?). Regions differ. Most Latin American governments do little to offset their countries’ high inequality of market incomes, with Argentina being the clearest exception. In East Asia, Japan and South Korea also do little to redistribute income from rich to poor, but they have much less inequality of market incomes in the first place.

Widespread progressivity is less than 110 years old. Back in 1910, redistribution hardly favoured the poor at all. No country had sizeable direct taxes or transfers, as implied by Figure 2. To underscore how little was given in any country, consider a clear overestimate. Suppose that all direct taxes came from the very top income ranks (untrue), and that all social transfers were given over to the very bottom income ranks (also untrue). The most that could have been transferred from top to bottom is the lesser of these two shares of GDP. In 1910, that was only 2.7% for Britain, and less than 1.5% for every other country. Compare this with today’s (c2013) Gini coefficients. Of the 53 countries in today’s group photo, only Mexico, Turkey, and Korea redistribute as little from rich to poor as did Britain, the progressive leader back in 1910.

Figure 2 Changes in fiscal progressivity since c1910

There have been some retreats from progressivity along the way, but in most cases the lost ground has been regained since. Chile’s famous shift to regressivity after 1973 has been dramatically reversed since the return of democracy after 1989. The Thatcher-Reagan revolutions were also limited and temporary. As suggested by Figure 2, neither of them erased the whole century-long rise of progressivity, and both have since been completely offset by the return of the gradual trend toward progressivity. Among democracies, Sweden is the one clearly quantified case of a country with an enduring retreat from progressivity.[2] Back in 1983, its taxes and transfers shifted enough resources to reduce inequality by 20.5 Gini percentage points. By 2009, this redistribution had retreated to 12.3 percentage points, and no upturn of progressivity is in sight, even though the 2009 redistribution from richer toward poorer still exceeds any achieved by Sweden since the 1970s or earlier. Interestingly, the US has continued to creep toward progressivity, helped by the rising importance of workers’ Earned Income Tax Credit and the increasing use of food stamps.

For other countries, do the latest trends point toward more redistribution or toward less? The results since the 1980s suggest stability and convergence in governments’ redistribution. On the one hand, no global renewal of the 20th century’s global rise of progressivity is foreseeable. The forces that have ushered in that century of redistribution – the rise of average incomes above subsistence, the improvement of governments’ ability to tax, and the spread of political voice for the masses – have reached their foreseeable limits, at least for the rich industrialised democracies. On the other hand, there is also reason to doubt that there has been any widespread retreat toward governments’ redistributing incomes from poor to rich. The OECD’s estimates for about a dozen countries from the mid-1980s to about 2013 show no net change in redistribution, once one has adjusted for cyclical effects.[3]

The lack of any clear retreat to regressivity since the 1970s or 1980s implies an important corollary for the debate over the disturbing rise of overall inequality in this same era. None of this rise is due to a net shift of government budgets towards helping the rich at the expense of the poor. The entire net rise of inequality must have been due to changes in the market economy, such as technological bias, globalisation, and/or trends in human capital.

Scanning the horizon for possible regressive influences on government behaviour in the near future, one should fix one’s gaze in the direction of the treatment of age groups. Since the 1970s, a few countries have exhibited mission drift in their social spending policies, under-investing in lower-income children and those of working age, and relatively overprotecting the elderly. While every country has dramatically reduced poverty among the elderly, Japan, the US, Portugal, and Greece have been particularly remiss in raising the income floor for younger age groups.

Authors’ note: Based on the Fifth Angus Maddison Development Lecture, OECD, 3 October 2017. The Working-paper version is Lindert (2017). The author thanks Orsetta Causa, Marc Fleurbaey, Mikkel Hermansen, Kathy Lindert, Nora Lustig, Eugene Smolensky, Daniel Waldenström, and Jeffrey Williamson for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

References

Atkinson, T and S Morelli (2014), “The chartbook of economic inequality”, VoxEU.org, 26 March.

Bengtsson, N, B Holmlund and D Waldenström (2016), “Lifetime versus Annual Tax Progressivity: Sweden, 1968–2009”, Scandinavian Journal of Economics 118(4): 619-45.

Lindert, P H (2017), “The Rise and Future of Progressive Redistribution”, Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Institute Working Paper 73, Tulane University.

Lustig, N (2017), “Fiscal Policy, Income Redistribution and Poverty Reduction in Low and Middle Income Countries”, CEQ Working Paper No. 54.

OECD (2011), Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising. Paris: OECD Publishing, Chapter 7.

OECD (2016), Downloadable update of the OECD Income Distribution Database.

OECD (forthcoming), Income Redistribution through Taxes and Transfers across OECD Countries. Paris: OECD Publishing. ECO/CPE/WP1 (2017) 21.

Piketty, T, E Saez, and G Zucman (2016), “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States”, NBER Working Paper No. 22945 (including its links to online appendices)..

Endnotes

[1] The two sources have used different measures. For the usual OECD countries, the OECD (2017 and earlier studies cited therein) omitted transfers in kind such as public education and public health, and restricted its estimates to the population of working age. The CEQ, by contrast, included in-kind transfers and the elderly in its measures for Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and South Africa. The difference in perspectives should not have affected the estimates of net redistribution enough to change any qualitative conclusions here.

[2] This statement sets aside the countries where communist regimes have broken up. Presumably many of them experienced regressive shifts in income redistribution in the process, though these are hard to quantify.

[3] OECD (2011, 2016, forthcoming). The forthcoming OECD study will disagree with my interpretation of their data. Yet the seeming decline stems from some biases in presentation. Their study has chosen to set aside the rise in progressivity that their data showed from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, instead emphasising a decline in progressivity from the mid-1990s to about 2013. Furthermore, at their chosen starting point in the mid-1990s, the Nordic countries showed high progressivity simply because they were in crisis at the time. The longer comparison of the 1980s and the 2010s is more cyclically neutral, and shows no clear trend.

Suppression of the Wealth Tax: An Historical Error

Thomas Piketty:

Suppression of the wealth tax: an historical error, by Thomas Piketty: Let it be said at once: the suppression of the wealth tax (Impôt sur la Fortune or ISF) constitutes a serious moral, economic and historical mistake. This decision reveals a profound misunderstanding of the challenges to inequality posed by globalization.

Let’s go back for a moment. During the first globalization period between 1870 and 1914, a strong international movement gradually took shape which sought to promote a new type of redistribution and taxation. Based on a progressive taxation system on income, wealth and inheritance, this new model was aimed at a better distribution of productivity gains and the structural reduction of the concentration of property and economic power. It was successfully implemented in the period 1920 to 1970, partly as a result of the pressure of dramatic historical events, but equally thanks to a lengthy intellectual and political process.

We may perhaps today be witnessing the premises of a similar movement. Confronted with the rise in inequality, awareness is gaining momentum. ...

Monopoly Rents and Corporate Taxation

Paul Krugman:

Monopoly Rents and Corporate Taxation (Wonkish): At one level it’s hard to take the Trump administration’s tax “reform” push seriously. A guy gets elected as a populist and his first two big proposals are (a) taking away health insurance from millions (b) cutting corporate taxes. Wow.

Furthermore, Trump is invincibly ignorant on taxes (and everything else) — he keeps declaring that America is the highest taxed nation in the world, which is nearly the opposite of the truth among advanced countries. And his allies in Congress aren’t ignorant, but they’re liars: Paul Ryan is the master of mystery meat, of promising to raise and save trillions in unspecified ways.

But there is an actual interesting question here, even if we shouldn’t give any credence to Republican answers. Who does, in fact, pay the corporate profit tax? Does it fall on corporations, and hence eventually on their shareholders? Or is the ultimate incidence mainly on wages, as the administration claims?

Skipping forward to the punchline:

...much corporate taxation probably doesn’t fall on returns to physical capital, but rather on monopoly rents. ... As long as the local source of profit is some kind of monopoly rent, corporate tax incidence is going to fall on shareholders, not workers. ...

And there’s a lot of reason to believe that market power is an increasingly big deal. ...

This changes the narrative, doesn’t it? Instead of focusing on rising capital mobility as a reason profits taxes might fall on workers, maybe we should focus on rising market power as a reason why profits taxes fall on capitalists.

The point for now is that when someone tells you that changes in the world have made old-style corporate taxes obsolete, be skeptical. Some changes in the world may have made profit taxation a better idea than ever.

Raghuram Rajan: Populist Nationalism Is “the First Step Toward Crony Capitalism”

Asher Schechter at ProMarket discusses Raghuram Rajan's views on the rise of populist nationalism:

Raghuram Rajan: Populist Nationalism Is “the First Step Toward Crony Capitalism”: The wave of populist nationalism that has been sweeping through Western democracies in the past two years is “a cry for help from communities who have seen growth bypass them.”

So said Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, during a keynote address he gave at the Stigler Center’s conference on the political economy of finance that took place in June. 

Rajan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, spoke about the “concentrated and devastating” impact of technology and trade on blue-collar communities in areas like the Midwest, the anger toward “totally discredited” elites following the 2008 financial crisis, and the subsequent rise of populist nationalism, seen as a way to restore a sense of community via exclusion.

In his talk, Rajan focused on three questions related to current populist discontent: 1. Why is anger focused on trade? 2. Why now? 3. Why do so many voters turn to far-right nationalist movements?

“Pointing fingers at these communities and telling them they don’t understand is not the right answer,” he warned. “In many ways, the kind of angst that we see in industrial countries today is similar to the bleak times [of] the 1920s and 1930s. Most people in industrial countries used to believe that their children would have a better future than their already pleasant present. Today this is no longer true.” ...

There's quite a bit more. I don't agree with everything he (Raghuram) says, but thought it might provoke discussion.

The Growing Dispersion of Wages and Productivity in OECD countries

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Patrick Blanchenay, and Chiara Criscuolo at VoxEU:

Great Divergences: The growing dispersion of wages and productivity in OECD countries: Summary Some firms pay well while others don’t; and some are highly productive while many aren’t. This column presents new firm-level data on the increasing dispersion of wages and productivity in both the manufacturing and services sectors in 16 OECD countries. Wage inequalities are growing between firms, even those operating in the same sector – and they are linked to growing differences between high and low productivity firms. Both globalisation and technological progress (notably information and communications technologies) influence these outcomes – as do policies and institutions such as minimum wages, employment protection legislation, unions, and processes of wage-setting.

The Link between Family Structure and Wealth Is Weaker Than You Might Think

William Emmons and Lowell Ricketts of the St. Louis Fed:

The Link between Family Structure and Wealth Is Weaker Than You Might Think: ...While there is an overall correlation between, say, two-parent families and higher wealth, research presented at the symposium found that this link actually is inconsistent across racial and ethnic groups and quite weak in a causal sense.

Spurious Connections

In a nutshell, when we focus on family-structure differences within racial or ethnic groups, rather than between groups, there is essentially no relationship at all. Our interpretation is that any correlation between family structure and wealth that exists in aggregate data is largely spurious. That is, it reflects deeply rooted structural, systemic or other unobservable factors that differ across races and ethnicities.

These “deep” causes of differences in both family structure and wealth accumulation could include:

• The continuing effects of past discrimination
• Segregation in housing, health care and education
• Environmental, epigenetic (that is, suppressed expression of true genetic abilities) or cultural factors that differentially affect early-childhood development

We concluded that family-structure differences are a symptom of deeper driving forces, not an important cause per se of wealth differences. One implication is that, even if we could change patterns of marriage and child-bearing among many people, this alone would be unlikely to affect racial and ethnic wealth gaps very much, if at all. ...

Minimum Wages and the Distribution of Family Incomes in the United States

Arindrajit Dube at Equitable Growth: 

Minimum wages and the distribution of family incomes in the United States: Introduction The ability of minimum-wage policies in the United States to aid lower-income families depends on how they affect wage gains, potential job losses, and other sources of family income, including public assistance. In contrast to a large body of research on the effects of minimum wages on employment,¹ there are relatively fewer studies that empirically estimate the impact of minimum wage policies on family incomes. 

In my new paper, I use individual-level data between 1984 and 2013 from the Current Population Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau to provide a thorough assessment of how U.S. minimum wage policies have affected the distribution of family incomes.² Similar to existing work, I consider how minimum wages influence the poverty rate. Going beyond most existing research, however, I also calculate the effect of the policies for each income percentile, adjusting for family size. This highlights the types of families that are helped or hurt by wage increases. I also calculate the effect on a broader measure of income that includes tax credits and noncash transfers. I quantify the offset effect of higher wages on the use of transfer programs and the gains net of the offsets by income percentiles, painting a fuller picture of how minimum-wage policies affect the U.S. income distribution and the overall well-being of U.S. families.

Overall, I find robust evidence that higher minimum wages lead to increases in incomes among families at the bottom of the income distribution and that these wages reduce the poverty rate. A 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduces the nonelderly poverty rate by about 5 percent. At the same time, I find evidence for some substitution of government transfers with earnings, as evidenced by the somewhat smaller income increases after accounting for tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and noncash transfers such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The overall increase in post-tax income is about 70 percent as large as the increase in pretax income. ...

Tax Reforms and Top Incomes

Enrico Rubolino and Daniel Waldenström at VoxEU:

Tax reforms and top incomes: The link between tax progressivity and the income distribution is the subject of intense debate. This column presents new evidence from tax reforms during the 1980s and 1990s to examine how reduced progressivity affects top income shares. Reduced progressivity boosted top incomes, particularly for those in the top 0.1% of earners. Income tax changes are a plausible candidate for explaining the recent surge in income inequality. ...

Tax reforms did not increase the size of the cake

Tax progressivity was reduced in the 1980s on the argument that there would be a positive impact on economic activity and efficiency (Auerbach and Slemrod 1997, Gale and Samswick 2014). Therefore it could be that the estimated boost in top shares reflects new resources created in top groups, rather than a redistribution of incomes away from the bottom and middle. We evaluate this hypothesis..., this analysis does not show large real income responses to reductions in progressivity. ...

Taxation and inequality

Our findings suggest that tax progressivity changes influence pre-tax income inequality. Focusing on large, progressivity-reducing tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, we show that they had a positive, increasing effect on top income shares in all the countries we studied. ...

Why People Prefer Unequal Societies

People prefer fair inequality:

Why people prefer unequal societies, by Christina Starmans , Mark Sheskin  & Paul Bloom, Nature Human Behaviour 1, Article number: 0082 (2017): Abstract There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies. We suggest that these two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness. Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children, we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality. Both psychological research and decisions by policymakers would benefit from more clearly distinguishing inequality from unfairness. ...

Economic Growth in the US: A Tale of Two Countries

Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman at VoxEU:

Economic growth in the US: A tale of two countries: The rise of economic inequality is one of the most hotly debated issues today in the US (Furman 2016) and indeed in the world. Yet economists and policymakers alike face important limitations when trying to measure and understand the rise of inequality.

One major problem is the disconnect between macroeconomics and the study of economic inequality. Macroeconomics relies on national accounts data to study the growth of national income, while the study of inequality relies on individual or household income, survey, and tax data. Ideally all three sets of data should be consistent, but they are not. The total flow of income reported by households in survey or tax data adds up to barely 60% of the national income recorded in the national accounts, with this gap increasing over the past several decades.¹

This disconnect between the different data sets makes it hard to address important economic and policy questions, such as:

• What fraction of economic growth accrues to those in the bottom 50%, the middle 40%, and the top 10% of the income distribution?
• What part of the rise in inequality is due to changes in the share of national income that goes to workers (labor income) and owners (capital income) versus changes in how these labour and capital incomes are distributed among individuals?

A second major issue is that economists and policymakers do not have a comprehensive view of how government programs designed to ameliorate the worst effects of economic inequality actually affect inequality. Americans share almost one-third of the fruits of economic output (via taxes that help pay for an array of social services) through their federal, state, and local governments. These taxes collectively add up to about 30% of national income, and are used to fund transfers and public goods that ultimately benefit all US families. Yet we do not have a clear measure of how the distribution of pre-tax income differs from the distribution of income after taxes are levied and after government spending is taken into account. This makes it hard to assess the extent to which governments make income growth more equal.²

In a recent paper, we attempt to create inequality statistics for the US that overcome the limitations of existing data by creating distributional national accounts (Piketty et al. 2016). We combine tax, survey, and national accounts data to build a new series on the distribution of national income. National income is the broadest measure of income published in the national accounts and is conceptually close to gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic growth.³ Our distributional national accounts enable us to provide decompositions of growth by income groups consistent with macroeconomic growth.

In our paper, we calculate the distribution of both pre-tax and post-tax income. The post-tax series deducts all taxes and then adds back all transfers and public spending so that both pre-tax and post-tax incomes add up to national income. This allows us to provide the first comprehensive view of how government redistribution in the US affects inequality. Our benchmark series use the adult individual as the unit of observation and split income equally among spouses in married couples. But we also produce series where each spouse is assigned their own labour income, allowing us to study gender inequality and its impact on overall income inequality. In this column, we would like to highlight three striking findings.

Our first finding: A surge in income inequality...

Our second finding: Policies to ameliorate income inequality fall woefully short ...

Our third finding: Comparing income inequality among countries is enlightening ...

Compensation Benchmarking, Leapfrogs, and the Surge in Executive Pay

A follow-up to "Inequality and the Lake Wobegon Effect":

Compensation Benchmarking, Leapfrogs, and the Surge in Executive Pay, by Thomas A. DiPrete; Gregory M. Eirich; Matthew Pittinsky, American Journal of Sociology: Abstract: Scholars frequently argue whether the sharp rise in chief executive officer (CEO) pay in recent years is "efficient" or is a consequence of "rent extraction" because of the failure of corporate governance in individual firms. This article argues that governance failure must be conceptualized at the market rather than the firm level because excessive pay increases for even relatively few CEOs a year spread to other firms through the cognitively and rhetorically constructed compensation networks of "peer groups," which are used in the benchmarking process to negotiate the compensation of CEOs. Counterfactual simulation based on Standard and Poor's ExecuComp data demonstrates that the effects of CEO "leapfrogging" potentially explain a considerable fraction of the overall upward movement of executive compensation since the early 1990s. [download]

The World's Easiest Chart to Make

In case you were wondering (any your probably weren't), from Kevin Drum:

Well, This Was the World's Easiest Chart to Make: CBPP has calculated how much tax money you'll save if Obamacare is repealed. Behold:

You know what really gets me? Even among the millionaires, repeal will only net them about $50,000. That's like finding spare change in the sofa cushions for this crowd. Is clawing back a few nickels and dimes really worth immiserating 20 million people?

Robots and Inequality: A Skeptic's Take

Douglas Campbell:

Robots and Inequality: A Skeptic's Take: Paul Krugman presents "Robot Geometry" based on Ryan Avent's "Productivity Paradox". It's more-or-less the skill-biased technological change hypothesis, repackaged. Technology makes workers more productive, which reduces demand for workers, as their effective supply increases. Workers still need to work, with a bad safety net, so they end up moving to low-productivity sectors with lower wages. Meanwhile, the low wages in these sectors makes it inefficient to invest in new technology.

My question: Are Reagan-Thatcher countries the only ones with robots? My image, perhaps it is wrong, is that plenty of robots operate in Japan and Germany too, and both countries are roughly just as technologically advanced as the US. But Japan and Germany haven't seen the same increase in inequality as the US and other Anglo countries after 1980 (graphs below). What can explain the dramatic differences in inequality across countries? Fairly blunt changes in labor market institutions, that's what. This goes back to Peter Temin's "Treaty of Detroit" paper and the oddly ignored series of papers by Piketty, Saez and coauthors which argues that changes in top marginal tax rates can largely explain the evolution of the Top 1% share of income across countries. (Actually, it goes back further -- people who work in Public Economics had "always" known that pre-tax income is sensitive to tax rates...) They also show that the story of inequality is really a story of incomes at the very top -- changes in other parts of the income distribution are far less dramatic. This evidence also is not suggestive of a story in which inequality is about the returns to skills, or computer usage, or the rise of trade with China. ...

America’s Two-Track Economy

Peter Dizikes at the MIT News Office:

America’s two-track economy: For many people in America, being middle class isn’t what it used to be.

Consider: In 1971, the U.S. middle class — with household incomes ranging from two-thirds to double the national median — accounted for almost 60 percent of total U.S. earnings. But in 2014, middle-class households earned just about 40 percent of the total national income. And, adjusted for inflation, the incomes of goods-producing workers have been flat since the mid-1970s.

“We have a fractured society,” says MIT economist Peter Temin. “The middle class is vanishing.”

Now Temin, the Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus of Economics in MIT’s Department of Economics, has written a book exploring the topic. “The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,” published this month by MIT Press, examines the plight of middle-income earners and offers some prescriptions for changing our current state of affairs.

The “dual economy” in the book’s title also represents a bracing reflection of America’s class schism. Temin, a leading economic historian, draws the term from the work of Nobel Prize winner W. Arthur Lewis, who in the 1950s applied the model of a dual economy to developing countries. In many of those nations, Lewis contended, there was not a single economy but a two-track economy, with one part containing upwardly-mobile, skilled workers and the other part inhabited by subsistence workers.

Applied to the U.S. today, “The Lewis model actually works,” Temin says. “The economy can grow, but it detaches from the [subsistence] sector. Simple as it is, the Lewis model offers the benefit that a good economic model does, which is to clarify your thinking.”

In Temin’s terms, updated, America now features what he calls the “FTE sector” — people who work in finance, technology, and electronics — and “the low-wage sector.” Workers in the first sector tend to thrive; workers in the second sector usually struggle. Much of the book delves into how the U.S. has developed this way over the last 40 years, and how it might transform itself back into a country with one economy for all.

Headwinds for workers

As Temin sees it, there are multiple reasons for the decline in middle-class earning power. To cite one: The decline of unionization, he contends, has reduced the bargaining power available to middle class workers.

“In the [political and economic] turmoil of the ’70s and ’80s, the unions declined, and the institutions that had been keeping labor going along with rising productivity were destroyed,” Temin says. “It’s partly [due to] new technology, globalization, and public policy — it’s all of these things. What it did was disconnect wages from the growth in productivity.”

Indeed, from about 1945 until 1975, as Temin documents in the book, U.S. productivity gains and the wage gains of goods-producing workers tracked each other closely. But since 1975, productivity has roughly doubled, while those wages have stayed flat.

Where “The Vanishing Middle Class” moves well beyond a discussion of basic economic relations, however, is in Temin’s insistence that readers consider the interaction of racial politics and economics. As he puts it in the book, “Race plays an important part in discussions of politics related to inequality in the United States.”

To take one example: Again starting in the 1970s, incarceration policies led to an increasing proportion of African-Americans being jailed. Today, Temin notes, about one in three African-American men will serve jail time, which he calls “a very striking figure. You can see how that would just destroy the fabric of a community.” After all, those who become imprisoned see a significant reduction in their ability to obtain healthy incomes over their lifetimes.

For that matter, Temin observes, incarceration has expanded so dramatically it has affected the ability of society to pay for prisons, which may be a factor that limits their further growth. At the moment, he notes in the book, the U.S. states pay roughly $50 billion a year for prisons and roughly $75 billion annually to support higher education.

Solutions?

Temin contends in the book that a renewed focus on education is a principal way to distribute opportunities better throughout society.

“The link between the two parts of the modern dual economy is education, which provides a possible path that children of low-wage workers can take to move into the FTE sector,” Temin writes.

That begins with early-childhood education, which Temin calls “critically important” — although, he says, “in order to continue those benefits, [students] have to build on that foundation. That goes all the way up to college.”

And for students in challenging social and economic circumstances, Temin adds, what matters is not just the simple acquisition of knowledge but the classroom experiences that lead to, as he puts it, “Knowing how to think, how to get on with people, how to cooperate. All the social skills and social capital … [are] going to be critically important for kids in this environment.”

In the book Temin bluntly advocates for greater investment in public schools as well as public universities, saying that America’s “educational system was the wonder of the 20th century.” It still works very well, he notes, for kids at good public schools and for those college students who graduate without burdensome debt.

But for others, he notes, “We don’t have a path for the next generation to have what we expect for a middle-class life … [and] not everyone wants to finance it.”

“The Vanishing Middle Class” comes amid increasing scrutiny of class relations in the U.S., but at a time when the public discussion of the topic is still very much evolving. Gerald Jaynes, a professor in the departments of Economics and African American Studies at Yale University, calls Temin’s new book “a significant addition to the existing literature on inequality.”

Temin, for his part, hopes that by the end of “The Vanishing Middle Class,” readers will agree that a society paying for more education will have made a worthy investment.

“The people in this country are the resource we have,” Temin says. “If we maintain the character of our fellow citizens, that is really our national strength.”

It Takes “Alternative Math” to Claim That Redistribution Is Futile

Adam M. Finkel at RegBlog:

It Takes “Alternative Math” to Claim That Redistribution Is Futile: The unequal distribution of costs and benefits across society is one of the hottest topics in the regulatory arena—and one that, regretfully, has sparked fundamentally flawed arguments, threatening to distort and obscure much-needed discussion about redistributive policies. ...

Although all policies have redistributive effects, some ideologies are viscerally, even militantly, opposed to government interventions that benefit the poor, whether by intention or even as a side effect of an otherwise sound policy. ...

In a recent New York Times op-ed, University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Deirdre McCloskey exemplifies this type of argument, in conspicuously misguided fashion. In her column, McCloskey offers a litany of reasons as to why progressive taxation and other policies aimed at redistributing benefits to the poor are ill-advised. At the core of the essay, McCloskey makes the empirical assertion that such policies cannot actually make much of a difference in any event.

Unfortunately, the basic mathematics of McCloskey’s claim are mangled. She may not prefer that we seek progressive tax and regulatory policies, but her claim that these policies do not “uplift the poor very much” is erroneous. That the Times has decided not to correct her error—even in the face of an email exchange in which the author herself acknowledged her mistake—may be an example of how tempting it is to ascribe black-and-white factual issues to the realm of “healthy controversy.” ...

As with many of the toxic myths about regulation—that, for example, it is responsible for destroying countless jobs while failing to create any new ones in the process, or that it relies on gross exaggerations of risk and plays to irrational public fears—we are lost without the ability to distinguish between ideological responses to facts and ideological twisting of facts into nonsense. ...

Let's Think Harder About the Role of Globalization in Wage Stagnation

Brad DeLong:

Let's Think Harder About the Role of Globalization in Wage Stagnation: It's disturbing. As we face the probable abrogation of NAFTA, possible trade wars with China, Germany, and others, and the total cluster** that is the Trump administration's policies (if any) toward NATO and Russia, a number of really smart and really well-intentioned people are, I think, making rhetorical--and in some cases substantive--errors that are degrading the quality of the debate and increasing the chances of bad outcomes. And they are doing it while trying to be forces for good, light, human betterment, truth, justice, and the American way...

So let me do some boundary policing here...

Let me ask people--all of whom are wiser than I am, or if not wiser smarter, or if not smarter more knowledgeable--to think about whether they really hold the positions they set forward, and think about whether they have set them forward in a way most calculated to guard against destructive misinterpretation. Today: Larry Summers...

Larry's big point here--the headline--is 100% correct: Revoking Trade Deals Will Not Help American Middle Classes. Hold tight to that.

Larry's second point is also correct: the big deal in terms of the changing shape of the American workforce--and, quite plausibly, changing life chances, the collapse of upward mobility, and wage stagnation--is technology: rampant improvement in manufacturing technology coupled with limited demand, for while nearly all of us want one few of us want too and only a minuscule proportion of us want three refrigerators. That means that if you are hoping to be relatively high up in the wage distribution by virtue of your position as a hard-to-replace cog on a manufacturing assembly line, you are increasingly out of luck. If you are hoping for high blue-collar wages to lift your own via competition, you are increasingly out of luck.

But then Larry goes, I think, rhetorically awry. His third point should be that inequality has been a political creation: those elected to power in America in the 1980s were elected on the platform that America's biggest problem was that it was, economically, too equal a society. Economic equality was strangling entrepreneurship and enterprise. And so they undertook policies to raise inequality. Those policies were successful. But we are still waiting for the flourishing of entrepreneurship and enterprise. He passes over this, not because he does not know this but because he has other fish to fry. Passing over what should have been his third point is, I think, a major rhetorical mistake: it is never good to pass up an opportunity to remind readers that the rise in inequality since 1980 has been something that those who made the Reagan Revolution hoped to accomplish and are proud of.

Bargaining power has flowed to finance and the executive suite and away from the shop- and assembly-floor. Top tax rates have come way down. It could have been otherwise--this is, primarily, a thing that has happened in English-speaking countries. It has happened much less elsewhere. It could have happened much less here.

And then, I think, Larry goes rhetorically awry again by passing over what ought to have been his fourth point. Over and above the decision to put the government's thumb on the scale assisting in the rise of inequality, wage stagnation and manufacturing decline have been driven by bad macroeconomic policies. The consequences of the Reagan deficits were to cream midwestern manufacturing and destroy worker bargaining power in export and import-competing industries. The switch from government surpluses to deficits under George W. Bush had much the same consequences. The low-pressure economies of Volcker, late Greenspan, and Bernanke wreaked immense damage. The strong-dollar policy was kept long past its proper sell-by date. A rich country like the United States ought to be a net lender to abroad, and ought to have a dollar policy that supports that net lending. Larry passes over this as well.

And so, rather than going technology--willed inequality--bad macro policies--globalization, Larry jumps from technology to globalization. Globalization thus shows up as the second most important factor affecting middle-class wages and inequality rather than the fourth.

It is at this point that I have, I think, a (rare) substantive disagreement with Larry. And I do acknowledge that when I have substantive disagreements with Larry, I am wrong at least as often as I am right.

Larry sees the coming of globalization as bringing with it a sharp reduction in the market power of American blue-collar workers in mass-production industries, and thus as exerting significant downward pressure on middle class wages and upward pressure on inequality. The live question, he thinks, is how large and significant these pressures have been.

I see it differently. Yes, technology, inequality promotion--union busting, so-called "right to work" laws, stagnant minimum wages, etc.--and lousy macro policies working through their effects on the trade sector have creamed the market bargaining power of American blue-collar workers. But globalization? Globalization's big effect has been to enable the construction of intercontinental value chains and to create a much finer global division of labor. It has greatly weakened the bargaining power of unskilled manufacturing workers here in the United States, yes. But has it done the same to semi-skilled and skilled manufacturing workers? If the United States had imposed barriers to the construction of intercontinental value chains would the semi-skilled and skilled manufacturing workers of the U.S. be better off? Or would they face stronger and more effective competition from firms headquartered in Japan and Europe that had created efficient global value chains?

Unskilled manufacturing jobs are not good jobs. Semi-skilled and skilled manufacturing jobs are. I think that odds are at least 50-50 that Larry has gotten the sign of the effects of globalization on bargaining power wrong for those manufacturing jobs that are worth keeping.

Thus I don't think that Larry should concede that "the advent of global supply chains has changed production patterns in the US" in a manner adverse to the interests of blue-collar and middle-class American workers. I think that might be true, but equally probably might be false. I think we need to think harder about this...

On inequality in China

Thomas Piketty:

On inequality in China: With Trump and Brexit, the Western-type democratic model is under fire. The Chinese media are having a field day. In column after column, the Global Times (official daily newspaper) condemns the explosive cocktail of nationalism, xenophobia, separatism, TV-reality, vulgarity and ‘money reigns supreme’, the outcome of the so-called free elections and the wonderful political institutions which the West would like to impose on the world. No more lessons!

Recently the Chinese authorities organised an international colloquium on ‘The Role of Political Parties in Global Economic Governance’. The message sent to the colloquium by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was perfectly clear. Reliance on solid intermediary institutions such as the CCP (which includes 90 million members, or roughly 10% of the adult population, almost as many as the number of voters in the American or French primaries) enables the organisation of discussions and decision-making and the design of a model for stable, harmonious and duly considered development in which identity conflicts can be overcome.

By so doing, the Chinese regime may well be over-confident. The limits of the model are well known, beginning with the total lack of transparency and the ferocious repression suffered by all those who condemn the opacity of the regime. ...

Class & Confidence

Chris Dillow:

Class & confidence: On Radio 4’s Media Show yesterday Andrea Catherwood told Sarah Sands, the incoming editor of the Today programme:

The job specification did say that there was a requirement of extensive experience of broadcast journalism and a sound appreciation of studio broadcast techniques. You obviously got over that hurdle (16’23” in).

Many of us, though, wouldn’t even have tried the hurdle. If I’d had Ms Sands otherwise decent CV, I’d have looked at that job spec and ruled myself out as unqualified. Ms Sands, obviously, did not.

In this, she’s following many others. Tristram Hunt has become head of the V&A despite no experience of curating or of running large organizations. David Cameron wanted to become PM because he thought he’d be “rather good” at it – a judgment which now looks dubious. And the last Labour government asked David Freud to review welfare policy even though, by his own admission, he “didn't know anything about welfare at all.”

These people have something in common: they come from families sufficiently rich to afford private schooling*. And they are not isolated instances. ...

One thing that’s going on here is a difference in confidence. Coming from a posh family emboldens many people to think they can do jobs even if they lack requisite qualifications. By contrast, others get the confidence knocked out of them (16’20 in)**. As Toby Morris has brilliantly shown, apparently small differences in upbringing can over the years translate into differences not only in achievement but also in senses of entitlement.

The point is not (just) that people from working-class backgrounds suffer outright discrimination. It’s that they put themselves forward less than others, and so save hirers the bother of discriminating against them. ...

Herein lies an issue. In hiring Ms Sands (and no doubt many others like her) the BBC is conforming to a pattern whereby inequality perpetuates itself. This suggests that the corporation is badly placed to address what is for many of us one of the great issues of our time - the many aspects of class inequality – because it is part of the problem. And it compounds this bias by focusing upon other matters instead – for example by the incessant airtime it gives to the (Dulwich College-educated) Farage***. Bias consists not merely in what is said and reported, but in what is not – in the choice of agenda. In matters of class, the BBC is not impartial. ...

Why the Surge in Income Inequality?

Lane Kenworthy in Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews:

Why the Surge in Income Inequality?: Income inequality is more severe in the United States than in any other affluent longstanding-democratic country, and it has increased sharply in the past generation. ...

What has caused the surge in top-end income inequality? Is it a product of changes in the economy? Or, as Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal and Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics contend, have the key shifts been in America’s politics and policies? ...

Researchers tend to search for a dominant cause. We want to identify the most important determinant, partly because finding one reduces complexity and partly because it implies a straightforward solution to the problem. Much of the research on the rise of top-end income inequality has proceeded in this vein, with analysts focusing on one or another hypothesized cause and frequently concluding that it is indeed the key contributor. I don’t think any such conclusion is justified. The rise in the top 1 percent’s income share since the late 1970s is a product of multiple developments—growth in product market size, shifts in corporate governance, increases in the market power of some large firms, financialization, soaring stock values, union decline, and reductions in top tax rates—no one or two or even three of which look to have been dominant or decisive.

To some degree it’s pure historical coincidence that these developments occurred around the same time. But they also reinforced and accentuated one another.

Is the origin of these developments mostly economic or mostly political? Are they, in other words, a product of markets or a product of policy? My answer is: both. ...

Just as there is no single dominant cause of the rise in top-end income inequality, there is unlikely to be a silver bullet when it comes to solutions. ...

Is Global Equality the Enemy of National Equality?

Dani Rodrik:

Is Global Equality the Enemy of National Equality?: The question in the title is perhaps the most important question we confront, and will continue to confront in the years ahead. I discuss my take in this paper.

Many economists tend to be global-egalitarians and believe borders have little significance in evaluations of justice and equity. From this perspective, policies must focus on enhancing income opportunities for the global poor. Political systems, however, are organized around nation states, and create a bias towards domestic-egalitarianism. 

How significant is the tension between these two perspectives? Consider the China "trade shock." Expanding trade with China has aggravated inequality in the United States, while ameliorating global inequality. This is the consequence of the fact that the bulk of global inequality is accounted for by income differences across countries rather than within countries. 

But the China shock is receding and other low-income countries are unlikely to replicate China’s export-oriented industrialization experience. So perhaps the tension is going away?

Not so fast. The tension is even greater somewhere else: Relaxing restrictions on cross-border labor mobility would have an even stronger positive effect on global inequality, at the cost of adverse effects at the lower end of labor markets in rich economies. On the other hand, international labor mobility has some advantages compared to further liberalizing international trade in goods.

I discuss these issues and more here.

The Earnings Gap between Black and White Men

John Laidler at the NBER Digest:

The Earnings Gap between Black and White Men: Since the end of slavery a century and a half ago, differences between the earnings of black and white Americans have been a reality of the U.S. labor market. Among working men, this gap narrowed sharply between 1940 and 1970 and has remained largely stable ever since. In Divergent Paths: Structural Change, Economic Rank, and the Evolution of Black-White Earnings Differences, 1940-2014, (NBER Working Paper No. 22797), Patrick Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles point out that focusing only on those who are employed fails to account for the growing numbers of men who are not working for a number of reasons. This group includes those who are unemployed, disabled, or no longer searching for work, as well as the rising number of individuals who are incarcerated.

Among working men, "the median earnings gap between blacks and white fell by almost 60 percent from 1940 to 1980 (with large decreases in the 1940s and 1960s) but has been essentially flat ever since, remaining in the 35-40 percent range in every sample from 1980-2014," the researchers report. But when they consider the entire population of men, they find that the earnings gap has actually widened substantially in recent decades. In 2010, the gap in the population as a whole was comparable to that in 1950.

Their analysis, which focuses on the black-white earnings differences among prime-aged men from 1940 through the Great Recession, "points to the incredible lack of progress and, in many cases, regress in closing the gaps in labor market outcomes for black and white men."

The findings are most striking among median- and low-income blacks, whose position relative to median-income whites changed little in the seven-decade study period. In 1940, the earnings of a median-income black earner fell at the 24th percentile of the earnings distribution for whites. At the time of the Great Recession, the comparable black earners' earnings fall at the 27th percentile of the earnings distribution for whites—only a slight improvement in rank over the entire 75-year study period.

In contrast, a black earner at the 90th percentile of the distribution for African Americans saw progress relative to the earnings of whites. In 1940, the earnings of the 90th percentile black were comparable to those of the median white, but by the late 2000s, this earnings level had risen to the 75th percentile in the white earnings distribution.

The racial earnings gap around the median narrowed from 1940-70, due largely to broad economic forces which reduced the income disparities among all workers. But since then, the relative gains made by low-skilled blacks through improved education have been countered by the growing overall connection between education and economic rank, the researchers find. "Racial convergence in educational attainment would have led to strong positional gains for black men at the median and below, except that these men faced strong structural headwinds from the simultaneously rising returns to education, both in terms of wages and in the probability of employment," the researchers find.

By contrast, high-skilled black men have moved closer to their white counterparts in income, which the researchers suggest has been due to more-equal access to quality higher education and high-skilled occupations.

"While the entire economy has experienced a marked increase in earnings inequality, this increase has been even more dramatic for black men," the researchers find, "with those at the top continuing to make clear gains within the earnings distribution, and those at the bottom being especially harmed by the era of mass incarceration and the failing job market for men with low skills." The impact of rising incarceration is particularly striking: The incarceration rate tripled for black men between 1980 and 2010, from 2.6 percent to 8.3 percent of the population. The rate quintupled for white men, but remained much lower, at 1.5 percent of the population.

The researchers conclude that education "has played a subtle but extremely important role in the evolution of the racial earnings gap," both fueling and stalling progress.

Monopsony Takes Center Stage

Marshall Steinbaum at ProMarket:

Monopsony Takes Center Stage: In October, the Council of Economic Advisors released a report about monopsony in the labor market. That alone was rather astonishing—employer power and its consequences for labor market outcomes has been a distinctly minority concern in the economics profession for quite a while, notwithstanding mounting evidence of its importance coming from a number of subfields.

For that agenda to gain a hearing at the apex of economic policy-making is evidence of the shifting ground in matters of public economic debate. It is also reminiscent of the last time inequality was so high: then, as now, it sparked a sea change in the economics profession, including both the mainstreaming of labor exploitation as a subject of economic research and the founding of the American Economic Association. ...

Market Failure and Income Distribution

John Quiggin:

Market Failure and Income Distribution: Notes for Economics in Two Lessons: For quite a while now, I’ve been working through my book-in-progress...

Thinking about the standard market failures (monopoly, externality and so on), I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to say more about the interaction between market failure and income distribution. I’ve already looked at the opportunity costs involved in income redistribution and predistribution, but different kinds of questions are coming up in relation to issues like monopoly, privatisation and for-profit provision of public services.

The discussion here and at my blog has been very helpful in stimulating my thoughts, but I need to do a lot more clarification. Some preliminary thoughts are over the fold: comments and criticism much appreciated...

Should Some Countries Cease to Exist?

Branko Milanovic:

Should some countries cease to exist?: Working on global inequality makes you ask questions you would never ask otherwise simply because they would not occur to you. ...

Take the convergence economics. In growth theory, convergence indicates the regularity that poorer countries tend to grow faster than richer countries because they can use all the knowledge and innovations that the richer have already produced..., there is some evidence for conditional convergence in empirical studies and it is, for obvious reasons, considered a good thing.

Now, when you look more closely you realize that convergence is studied in terms of countries but in reality it deals with the convergence in living standards between individuals. We express it in terms of a poorer country catching up with the richer because we are used to doing our economics in terms of nation-states and implicitly assume that there is no movement of people between countries. But in reality convergence is nothing else but the diminution of income inequality between all individuals in the world.

So, how best to achieve such a decrease in inequality between people? Economic theory, common sense and simulation exercises clearly show that it can be best done by allowing free movement of people. Such a policy would increase global income (as any free movement of factors of production in principle should), reduce global poverty and global inequality. It is immaterial, from a global perspective, that it might slower between-country convergence (as some recent results for EU indicate) because countries are, as we have just seen, not the relevant entities in global economics: the relevant entities are individuals and their welfare levels. ... To see this point, think in the familiar terms of the nation-state: no one in his or her right mind would argue that people from the Appalachian in the US should not be allowed to move to California because the average income in the Appalachia might go down. In fact, both the average income in California and in Appalachia might go down, and both inequalities in the Appalachia and California might go up, and yet the overall US income would rise and US inequality would be less.

The argument is identical for the world as a whole ... The objections to migration, namely that it might reduce the average income in recipient countries, raised by Paul Collier in his book “Exodus” are immaterial because the real subject of our analysis is not the nation-state but the individual.

Thus far the argument seems to me entirely incontestable. But then things get a bit messier. Pushing this logic further, and using the results of the Gallup poll that show the percentage of people who desire to move out of their countries, we find that in the case of unimpeded global migration some countries could lose up to 90 percent of their populations. They may cease to exist: everybody but a few thousand people might move out. Even the few who might at first remain, could soon find their lives there intolerable, not least because providing public goods for a very small population may be exceedingly expensive.

So, what?—it could be asked. If Chad, Liberia and Mauritania cease to exist because everybody wants to move to Italy and France, why should one be concerned: people have freely chosen to be better off in Italy and France, and that’s all there is to that. But then, it could be asked, would not disappearance of countries also mean disappearance of distinct cultures, languages and religions? Yes, but if people do not care about these cultures, languages and religions, why should they be maintained?

Destroying the variety of human traditions is not costless, and I can see that one might believe that maintaining variety of languages and cultures is not less important that maintaining variety of the flora and fauna in the world, but I wonder who needs to bear the cost of that. Should people in Mali be forced to live in Mali because somebody in London thinks that some variety of human existence would be lost if they all came to England? I am not wholly insensitive to this argument, but I think that it would be more honest to say openly that the cost of maintaining this “worldwide heritage” is borne not by those who defend it in theory but by those in Mali who are not allowed to move out.

There is a clear trade-off between the maintenance of diversity of cultural traditions and freedom of individuals to do as they please. I would be happier if the trade-off did not exist, but it does. And if I have to choose between the two, I would choose human freedom even if it means loss of tradition. After all, are traditions that no one cares about worth preserving? The world has lost Macromanni, Quadi, Sarmatians, Visigoths, Alans, Vandals, Avars and thousands others. They have disappeared together with their languages, cultures and traditions. Do we really miss them today?

The In-Betweeners

Frances Coppola (the full post is much longer):

The in-betweeners: How effective is monetary policy?

Highly effective, according to the Governor of the Bank of England. In a speech earlier this week, Mark Carney robustly defended the Bank of England's record...

Well, lots of us might agree that monetary policy did help to offset the damaging effects of bank and household deleveraging in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. ...

But the most persistent criticism of monetary policy is that it has, in the words of HSBC's Stephen King, "unfortunate distributional effects". It benefits the holders of financial assets - primarily the rich - at the expense of those dependent on interest income, who are believed to be much poorer, though not necessarily the poorest.

Carney is having none of it. He rejected the distributional criticism of monetary policy... He points to these two charts as evidence that the poor have done better than the rich from monetary policy...

It is all very well crowing that the poorest have been supported. They have, to some extent, though perhaps not quite as much as you claim. But it is painfully evident that the "in-betweeners" have had much less support. Relative to the rich, they have lost out both in wealth and in income. And relative to the poor, they have lost out too: they no longer qualify for many benefits and other public support, and they are seeing public money going to people not much poorer than them while they are left to struggle on their own. These are people who see themselves as having done everything right: they have worked hard, saved and paid into the system. Now, they think the system has abandoned them. And with reason.

To be fair, it is not the Bank of England that has abandoned them, though some of them blame you for their woes: "in-betweener" pensioners are those who have been hardest hit by very low interest rates. The real failures lie on the fiscal side, and are of very long standing.

The promise of "cradle to grave" support upon which the British welfare state was founded has been systematically dismantled. Now, only the poorest are supported. The neglected in-betweeners are on their own. And their anger is shaking our political establishment to its foundations.

The American Dream, Quantified at Last

David Leonhardt:

The American Dream, Quantified at Last: ...Chetty, a Stanford professor, and his colleagues .... constructed a data set that shows the percentage of American children who earn more money — and less money — than their parents earned at the same age.

The index is deeply alarming. It’s a portrait of an economy that disappoints a huge number of people who have heard that they live in a country where life gets better, only to experience something quite different. ...

It begins with children who were born in 1940... The researchers went into the project assuming that most of these children had earned more than their parents — but were surprised to learn that nearly all of them had... About 92 percent of 1940 babies had higher pretax household earnings at age 30 than their parents had at the same age. (The results were similar at older ages and for post-tax earnings.)

The few 1940 children who earned less than their parents were also, for the most part, doing just fine. They were generally earning less because they had grown up rich...

For children born in 1950, the likelihood of achieving the American Dream had begun to fall but remained very high. ...

For babies born in 1980 — today’s 36-year-olds — the index of the American dream has fallen to 50 percent: Only half of them make as much money as their parents did. In the industrial Midwestern states that effectively elected Donald Trump, the share was once higher than the national average. Now, it is a few percentage points lower. There, going backward is the norm. ...

It goes on to discuss how the trend might be reversed.

Economic Growth in the United States: A Tale of Two Countries

Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman:

Economic growth in the United States: A tale of two countries, by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, Equitable Growth: Overview The rise of economic inequality is one of the most hotly debated issues today in the United States and indeed in the world. Yet economists and policymakers alike face important limitations when trying to measure and understand the rise of inequality.

One major problem is the disconnect between macroeconomics and the study of economic inequality. Macroeconomics relies on national accounts data to study the growth of national income while the study of inequality relies on individual or household income, survey and tax data. Ideally all three sets of data should be consistent, but they are not. The total flow of income reported by households in survey or tax data adds up to barely 60 percent of the national income recorded in the national accounts, with this gap increasing over the past several decades.¹

This disconnect between the different data sets makes it hard to address important economic and policy questions...

A second major issue is that economists and policymakers do not have a comprehensive view of how government programs designed to ameliorate the worst effects of economic inequality actually affect inequality. Americans share almost one-third of the fruits of economic output (via taxes that help pay for an array of social services) through their federal, state, and local governments. ... Yet we do not have a clear measure of how the distribution of pre-tax income differs from the distribution of income after taxes are levied and after government spending is taken into account. This makes it hard to assess the extent to which governments make income growth more equal.²

In a recent paper, the three authors of this issue brief attempt to create inequality statistics for the United States that overcome the limitations of existing data by creating distributional national accounts.³ We combine tax, survey, and national accounts data to build a new series on the distribution of national income. ... Our distributional national accounts enable us to provide decompositions of growth by income groups consistent with macroeconomic growth.

In our paper, we calculate the distribution of both pre-tax and post-tax income. The post-tax series deducts all taxes and then adds back all transfers and public spending so that both pre-tax and post-tax incomes add up to national income. This allows us to provide the first comprehensive view of how government redistribution in the United States affects inequality. Our benchmark series use the adult individual as the unit of observation and split income equally among spouses in married couples. But we also produce series where each spouse is assigned their own labor income, allowing us to study gender inequality and its impact on overall income inequality. In this short summary, we would like to highlight three striking findings.

Our first finding—a surge in income inequality

First, our data show that the bottom half of the income distribution in the United States has been completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s. ...

It’s a tale of two countries. For the 117 million U.S. adults in the bottom half of the income distribution, growth has been non-existent for a generation while at the top of the ladder it has been extraordinarily strong. And this stagnation of national income accruing at the bottom is not due to population aging. ...

Our second finding—policies to ameliorate income inequality fall woefully short

Our second main finding is that government redistribution has offset only a small fraction of the increase in pre-tax inequality. ...

Our third finding—comparing income inequality among countries is enlightening

Third, an advantage of our new series is that it allows us to directly compare income across countries. Our long-term goal is to create distributional national accounts for as many countries as possible; all the results will be made available online on the World Wealth and Income Database. One example of the value of these efforts is to compare the average bottom 50 percent pre-tax incomes in the United States and France.⁸ In sharp contrast with the United States, in France the bottom 50 percent of real (inflation-adjusted) pre-tax incomes grew by 32 percent from 1980 to 2014, at approximately the same rate as national income per adult. While the bottom 50 percent of  incomes were 11 percent lower in France than in the United States in 1980, they are now 16 percent higher. (See Figure 3.) ... Since the welfare state is more generous in France, the gap between the bottom 50 percent of income earners in France and the United States would be even greater after taxes and transfers.

The diverging trends in the distribution of pre-tax income across France and the United States—two advanced economies subject to the same forces of technological progress and globalization—show that working-class incomes are not bound to stagnate in Western countries. In the United States, the stagnation of bottom 50 percent of incomes and the upsurge in the top 1 percent coincided with drastically reduced progressive taxation, widespread deregulation of industries and services, particularly the financial services industry, weakened unions, and an eroding minimum wage.

Conclusion

Given the generation-long stagnation of the pre-tax incomes among the bottom 50 percent of wage earners in the United States, we feel that the policy discussion at the federal, state, and local levels should focus on how to equalize the distribution of human capital, financial capital, and bargaining power rather than merely the redistribution of national income after taxes. Policies that could raise the pre-tax incomes of the bottom 50 percent of income earners could include:

• Improved education and access to skills, which may require major changes in the system of education finance and admission
• Reforms of labor market institutions to boost workers’ bargaining power and including a higher minimum wage
• Corporate governance reforms and worker co-determination of the distribution of profits
• Steeply progressive taxation that affects the determination of pay and salaries and the pre-tax distribution of income, particularly at the top end

The different levels of government in the United States today obviously have the power to make income distribution more unequal, but they also have the power to make economic growth in America more equitable again. Potentially pro-growth economic policies should always be discussed alongside their consequences for the distribution of national income and concrete ways to mitigate their unequalizing effects. We hope that the distributional national accounts we present today can prove to be useful for such policy evaluations. ...

Why Not Centrism?

Chris Dillow:

Why not centrism?: Some people want to revive centrism. Tony Blair wants to “build a new policy agenda for the centre ground”. And the Lib Dems’ victory in Richmond Park is being seen as a warning to the Tories that it must “keep the votes of the middle ground.”

This poses the question: does the idea of political centre ground even make sense? It does, if you think of political opinion being distributed like a bell curve with a few extremists at either end and lots of moderates in the middle. But this doesn’t seem to apply today, and not just because political opinion has always been multi-dimensional. What we have now is a split between Leavers and Remainers, and the ideas correlated with those positions such as openness versus authoritarianism. Where does the “centre ground” fit into this? ...

This, I think, is the essence of centrism. It accepts that globalization and free markets (within limits) bring potential benefits, but that these benefits must be spread more evenly via the tax and welfare system. This stands in contrast to nativism and some forms of leftism which oppose globalization and favour market intervention. It also contrasts to libertarianism and Thatcherism which emphasize freeish markets whilst underplaying redistribution. It’s also what New Labour stood for. ...

I have a ... beef. It’s that this form of centrism offers too etiolated a vision of equality. Inequality isn’t simply a matter of pay packets but of power too. Centrism fails to tackle the latter. This is a big failing... For me, therefore, a centrism which ignores inequalities of power must be inadequate.

Herein, though, lies the sadness: even this form of centrism would be a big  improvement upon a lot of today’s politics.

Minimum Wage Increases and Earnings in Low-Wage Jobs

Brad DeLong:

I think I have to change my mind: Back when Card and Krueger first suggested that there was substantial effective monopsony power in the low-wage labor market and thus that there would be no disemployment effect from (modest) increases in the minimum wage to make it binding, I said: "Clever, but nahhh." The reason for their findings, I thought, was that labor demand is just inelastic in the short and perhaps the medium run--but maybe not in the long run.

I confess that I think I have to change my mind. Economists do not fail to find disemployment effects from (modest) increases in the minimum wage that make it binding because labor demand is inelastic and statistical power is insufficient. Employers actually do have substantial monopsony power in the low-wage labor market--even though they shouldn't. And the minimum wage is best thought of as an anti-monopsony rate-regulation policy that raises low-wage employment, raises average low-wage earnings, and brings the market closer to its competitive equilibrium:

Sandra Black, Jason Furman, Laura Giuliano and Wilson Powell: Minimum Wage Increases and Earnings in Low-Wage Jobs ...

One Tax Policy Americans Yugely Favor

Gerald E. Scorse:

One tax policy Americans yugely favor, The Hill: Nobody likes taxes, but roughly nine out of 10 Americans want income from investments to be taxed at least as much as other income. Republican leaders, tone-deaf,... close their eyes to a reform enacted under President Ronald Reagan: equal taxes on capital gains, dividends, and ordinary income such as wages. It’s one policy the country would love to have back, yugely. ...

The landslide national preference for at least equal taxes on investments—for tax fairness, not tax breaks—meshes perfectly with the populist belief that the system is rigged in favor of the rich. ... According to an analysis by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, the top 1 percent of Americans receives over 62 percent of the benefits from lower rates on capital gains, dividends and related tax preferences; for the top 10 percent, the total benefit share is just short of 80 percent.

That’s more than alright with Republicans, whose tax plans will likely drive those percentages even higher—in exactly the opposite direction of the reform ushered in a generation ago by President Reagan. He took Main Street’s side on taxing Wall Street gains, but the GOP likes to pretend it never happened. ...

Donald Trump rode the populist tide all the way to the White House. Let’s see if President Trump listens to the populist yearning—the yuge populist yearning—for equal taxes on income from wealth and income from work.

Should We Worry About the Top 1%, or Praise Them?

Miles Corak:

...Earnings mobility for children from the very broad middle—parents whose income ranges from the bottom 10 percent all the way to the cusp of the top 10 percent—is not tied strongly to family income. These children tend to move up or down the income distribution without regard to their starting point in life. This may be one element of insecurity among the middle class: in spite of their best efforts, their children may be as likely to lose ground and fall in the income distribution as they are to rise.

The situation is very different for children raised by top-earning parents...

Much more here.

We Must Rethink Globalization, or Trumpism will Prevail

Thomas Piketty:

We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail: Let it be said at once: Trump’s victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this. ...

The tragedy is that Trump’s program will only strengthen the trend towards inequality. ..

The main lesson for Europe and the world is clear: as a matter of urgency, globalization must be fundamentally re-oriented. The main challenges of our times are the rise in inequality and global warming. We must therefore implement international treaties enabling us to respond to these challenges and to promote a model for fair and sustainable development. ...

There should be no more signing of international agreements that reduce customs duties and other commercial barriers without including quantified and binding measures to combat fiscal and climate dumping in those same treaties. For example, there could be common minimum rates of corporation tax and targets for carbon emissions which can be verified and sanctioned. It is no longer possible to negotiate trade treaties for free trade with nothing in exchange. ... 

It is time to change the political discourse on globalization: trade is a good thing, but fair and sustainable development also demands public services, infrastructure, health and education systems. In turn, these themselves demand fair taxation systems. If we fail to deliver these, Trumpism will prevail.

I recently made a similar argument:

...Those of us in the economics profession have a choice to make. 

We can hold onto old ideas, inflated promises about the benefits of globalization and international trade for example, while charlatans such as Donald Trump take advantage of the fears people have to divide us through racism and xenophobia that miscasts the blame for our economic woes. Or we can recognize that change and new ways of thinking are needed and lead the way to policies that move us toward a more equitable economic system.

How Waning Competition Deepens Labor’s Plight

Eduardo Porter:

How Waning Competition Deepens Labor’s Plight: ...collectively, mergers ... are reconfiguring the American economy in ways that seem to be tilting the scales toward the interests of ever-larger corporations, to the broad detriment of labor. ...

Three years ago, the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz proposed that increasing profits from companies managing to avoid normal competitive forces — what economists refer to as “rents” — appeared to be an important factor in the rising share of the nation’s income flowing toward corporate profits and top executive pay in recent years. He surmised that weak labor unions ... did not have the clout to protect the workers’ share.

Since then, several other studies have presented various channels through which a lack of competition between employers could keep wages down. ...

Waning competition in employment can muck up the economy in more ways than one. It slows wage growth, of course. Lacking outside options, workers are much less likely to leave a job. But economic output and employment will suffer, too, because fewer workers will be willing to work for the lower wage. ...

Policy makers can push back against employers’ market power. Strengthening labor unions... Raising the minimum wage... But it seems there is an opportunity to rethink the nation’s approach to antitrust law, too. It shouldn’t be seen exclusively as a tool to protect consumers from sticker shock.

In a speech in September, Renata Hesse, the Justice Department’s acting assistant attorney general for antitrust, argued forcefully that “the antitrust laws were intended to benefit participants in the American economy broadly — not just in their capacity as consumers of goods and services.”

Antitrust enforcement efforts, Ms. Hesse said, “also benefit workers, whose wages won’t be driven down by dominant employers with the power to dictate terms of employment.” ...

Are Americans Better Off Than They Were a Decade or Two Ago?

Ben Bernanke and Peter Olson:

Are Americans better off than they were a decade or two ago?: Economically speaking, are we better off than we were ten years ago? Twenty years ago? When asked such questions, Americans seem undecided, almost schizophrenic, with large majorities saying the country is heading “in the wrong direction,” even as they tell pollsters that they are optimistic about their personal financial situations and the medium-term economic outlook.

In their thirst for evidence on this issue, commentators seized on the recent report by the Bureau of the Census, which found that real median household income rose by 5.2 percent in 2015, as showing that “the middle class has finally gotten a raise.” Unfortunately, that conclusion puts too much weight on a useful, but flawed and incomplete, statistic. Among the more significant problems with the Census’s measure are that: 1) it excludes taxes, transfers, and non-monetary compensation like employer-provided health insurance; and 2) it is based on surveys rather than more-complete tax and administrative data, with the result that it has been surprisingly inconsistent with the official national income numbers in recent years. Even if precisely measured, data on income exclude important determinants of economic well-being, such as the hours of work needed to earn that income.

While thinking about the question, we came across a recently published article by Charles Jones and Peter Klenow, which proposes an interesting new measure of economic welfare. While by no means perfect, it is considerably more comprehensive than median income, taking into account not only growth in per capita consumption but also changes in working time, life expectancy, and inequality. Moreover, as the authors demonstrate, it can be used to assess economic performance both across countries and over time. In this post we’ll report some of their results, and extend part of their analysis (which ends before the Great Recession) through 2015.[1]

The bottom line: According to this metric, Americans enjoy a high level of economic welfare relative to most other countries, and the level of Americans’ well-being has continued to improve over the past few decades despite the severe disruptions of the last one. However, the rate of improvement has slowed noticeably in recent years, consistent with the growing sense of dissatisfaction evident in polls and politics. ...

How Clones Can Experience Unequal Economic Outcomes

Tim Taylor:

How Clones Can Experience Unequal Economic Outcomes: A certain amount of economic inequality is just luck. At the extreme, some people win the lottery, and others don't. But there is also the potential for more subtle kinds of luck, like two equally talented entrepreneurs, where one business happens to take off while the other doesn't. Or two equally talented workers who go to work for similar-looking companies, but one company takes off while the other craters. Richard Freeman discusses the research literature on why this final example might be significant enough to play a role in overall economic inequality in the US in his essay, "A Tale of Two Clones: A New Perspective on Inequality," just published by the Third Way think tank. Freeman sets the stage like this (footnotes omitted):

"[C]onsider two indistinguishable workers, you and your clone. By definition, you/clone have the same gender, ethnicity, years of schooling, family background, skills, etc. In 2006 you/clone graduated with identical academic records from the same university and obtained identical job offers from Facebook and MySpace. Not knowing any more about the future than the analysts who valued Facebook and MySpace roughly equally in the mid-2000s, you/clone flipped coins to decide which offer to accept: heads – Facebook; tails – MySpace. Clone’s coin came up heads. Yours came up tails. Ten years later, Clone is in the catbird’s seat in the job market — high pay, stock options, a secure future. You struggle. Back to university? Send job search letters to close friends? Ask distant acquaintances to help? The you/clone thought experiment may seem extreme, but recent research that I have conducted with colleagues finds that the earnings of workers with near-clone similarity in attributes diverged so much by the place they worked that rising inequality in pay among employers has become the major factor in the trend rise in inequality. ... The labor market has been dominated by economic forces that pull the wages of firms further apart from each other, motivating our analysis of the role of employers in increasing inequality." 

In other words, a lot of inequality is about where you work. The rise in equality is linked to differences across what firms are paying employees who appear to be similarly qualified. As Freeman acknowledges, this argument that this is a quantitatively important cause of rising inequality isn't ironclad at this point, but it's highly suggested in several ways of looking at the data: Freeman  writes:

"This implies that 86% ... of the trend increase in inequality [from 1977-2009] occurs among people with measurably the same skills, whereas just 14% of the trend increase comes from changes in earnings among workers with different skills. The big surprise in the exhibit is that the inequality of average earnings among establishments increased by the same 0.147 points [measuring variance of natural log of earnings, a standard measure of inequality of earnings] as did inequality among workers with the same characteristics. This suggests that all of the increase in inequality among similar workers comes from the increase in earnings at their workplaces." 

Or here is a figure suggesting a linkage from firm earnings to individual inequality of earnings. The blue line shows the change in individual earnings along the income distribution from 1992-2007. As one would expect, given the rise in inequality, those in the bottom percentiles of the income distribution do worse, while those in the top percentiles of the income distribution do better. But now, notice that the blue line for individual earnings almost matches the orange line for firm earnings. That is, there has also been widening inequality in firm earnings, with those at the bottom of the earnings distribution also seeing a decline from 1992-2007 and those at the top seeing an increase. Freeman also offers evidence that those who stayed at firms have seen their earnings change with the fortunes of the firm--thus contributing to overall inequality. As he writes; "In sum, changes in the distribution of earnings among establishments affect the change in earnings along the entire earnings distribution and the increased advantage of top earners compared to other workers."

What makes it possible for successful firms to pay workers more? The answer must be rooted in higher productivity for those firms. Indeed, productivity seems to be diverging across firms, too.

Indeed, as Freeman emphasizes, this figure shows that the equality of revenue per worker--a rough measure of productivity at the firm level--is diverging faster than inequality of wages across firms. Moreover, Freeman argues that a similar pattern of productivity divergence across firms is happening within each sector of the economy.

 Freeman's evidence is consistent with some other studies. For example, last year I pointed to an OECD report on The Future of Productivity, which argued that while cutting-edge frontier firms continue to see strong increases in productivity, the reason for slower overall rates of productivity is that other firms aren't keeping up.

Thinking about inequality between similar workers may alter how one thinks about public policies related to underlying determinants of inequality. For example, it may be important to think about how productivity gains diffuse across industries and how that process may have changed. I suspect there is also some element of geographical separation here, where firms in certain areas are seeing faster productivity and wage increases, and so thinking about mobility of people and firms across geographic areas may be important, too.

Does the One Percent Deserve What it Gets?

Nancy Folbre:

Does the one percent deserve what it gets?: The rich are not like you and me. They contribute far more to society than everybody else, so argues Harvard University economist Gregory Mankiw in his essay “Defending the One Percent.” Mankiw’s praise for talented superstars such as Steven Jobs, J.K. Rowling, and Steven Spielberg quickly blooms into a more general argument that competitive labor markets pay workers what they deserve. This is music to the ears of high earners, and it sings to a very human desire to believe that the world is fair.

But this argument is based on neoclassical economic theories that define the domain of human choice in narrow terms, minimizing the effects of bad luck, bad markets, and bad inequalities that often predetermine market outcomes. Mankiw’s argument leaves room for corporate bad behavior defined in narrow terms as “gaming the system.” But what he most deplores is government meddling with the system.

Most economists do not explicitly endorse such views. But years of schooling in neoclassical economic theories predispose them to the view that perfectly competitive markets yield equitable as well as efficient outcomes. As a result, they often assess “rent seeking,” or efforts to get rich at someone else’s expense, by comparison with hypothetical market outcomes.

Rent seeking becomes just another name for interference with the magic meritocracy of the marketplace. From this perspective, efforts to increase the minimum wage can be considered just as unfair as efforts to challenge compensation practices for corporate chief executives and other well-heeled top managers.

Like neoclassical economic theory in general, this approach is too narrow. Competitive markets comprise a relatively small part of an economy dominated by large multinational corporations—marketplaces and firms that are embedded in a global environment of unpriced goods and services.

Efforts to get rich at someone else’s expense, which fall under the academic rubric of distributional conflict, are multidimensional. Forms of collective bargaining power based on citizenship, class, race and ethnicity, and gender, as well as other aspects of group identity, influence the resources that individuals bring to the labor market. They also influence the power that individuals possess to modify labor market outcomes.

Some of us contribute more than members of the top one percent to the economy, and some of us contribute less. None of us gets exactly what we deserve. One difference between the rich and us is that they have more money. They also enjoy—both as cause and effect—a lot more power.

Link to paper.

The Decline of the Middle Class is Causing Economic Damage

Larry Summers:

The decline of the middle class is causing even more economic damage than we realized: I have just come across an International Monetary Fund working paper on income polarization in the United States that makes an important contribution to the secular stagnation debate. The authors ... find that polarization has reduced consumer spending by more than 3 percent or about $400 billion annually. If these findings stand up to scrutiny, they deserve to have a policy impact.

This level of reduction in spending is huge. For example, it exceeds by a significant margin the impact in any year of the Obama stimulus program. Alone it would be enough to account for a significant reduction in neutral real interest rates. If consumers were spending 3 percent more, there would be scope to maintain full employment at interest rates much closer to normal. And there would be much less of a problem of monetary policy’s inability to respond to the next recession.

What is the policy implication? Principally, it is the macroeconomic importance of supporting middle class incomes. This can be done in a range of ways from promoting workers right to collectively bargain to raising spending on infrastructure to making the tax system more progressive. ...

Estate Tax a Key Tool for Fighting US Inequality

Caroline Freund at PIIE:

Estate Tax a Key Tool for Fighting US Inequality: This year marks the 100th anniversary of the US estate tax, which affects only the ultra-wealthy. Given the rising focus on American income inequality, the tax should be on solid ground. Not so.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate the estate tax, while Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton wants to revive it ...

There are good reasons to support this tax:

As I have pointed out previously, there is no productive activity in inheriting a large sum of money, so it does little to distort the economy.

Estate taxes also raise revenue and redistribute wealth. ...

Historically such taxes have worked well in the United States. ...

The future of the estate tax will depend heavily on the upcoming presidential election. Donald Trump would like to see it gone. This is not unthinkable, since in a largely symbolic vote last year the House of Representatives voted to abolish it. ...

Hillary Clinton proposes higher estate tax brackets as wealth increases, reaching 65 percent for a billionaire couple. My guess is that if people really understood the incidence of the tax, 99.8 percent of the population would support her proposal.

The Downside of Upward Mobility

Branko Milanovic:

The downside of upward mobility: ...If we ... really wanted to support upward mobility or give equal chances to all there are many political measures we could enact. ...Ganesh shows how totally politically unfeasible they are: confiscatory inheritance taxes, smaller class sizes in poorer neighborhood funded from the taxes from the rich, end of tax-exempt status for the richest universities, moral suasion that rich universities annually transfer 1% of their wealth to poorer state schools, criminalization of nepotism etc. None of these proposals will have the remotest chance of being accepted by those who currently wield political and economic power. ...

If upward mobility is about the relative positions in a society, then upward mobility for some implies downward mobility for the others. But if those currently at the top have a stronghold on the top places in society, there will no upward mobility however much we clamor for it. This positional (or relative) approach to mobility is a fairly accurate description of reality in societies that are growing slowly. In societies that develop quickly even if a lot of mobility is about positional advantages (and they are by definition fixed) it can be compensated by creating enough new social layers, new jobs and by making people richer. Thus the upwardly mobile have some room to move up which does not require an equal number of people to move down.

In more stagnant societies, mobility becomes a zero-sum game. To effect real social mobility in such societies, you need revolutions that, while equalizing chances or rather improving dramatically the chances of those on the bottom, do so at the cost of those on the top. In addition, they destroy many other things including lives, not only of those on the top but also of those on the bottom. ...

It is then not surprising that, short of such massive upheavals that shake the societies to their very core, countries tend to display relatively little positional mobility. ...

I think that we are led to a very somber conclusion here. In societies with slow growth, upward mobility is limited by the lack of opportunities and the solid grip that those who are on the top keep over the chances of their children to remain on the top. It is either self-delusion or hypocrisy to believe that societies with such unevenness of chances will come close to resembling “meritocracies”. But it is also the case that true upward mobility comes with an enormous price tag of lives lost and wealth destroyed.

Do U.S. Economists Ignore Inequality?

Arjun Jayadev at INET:  

Do U.S. Economists Ignore Inequality?: A thought-provoking report in The Atlantic seeks to explore an apparent paradox in the practice of economics in the United States: Despite the high levels of inequality that many view as a drag on the performance of the U.S. economy — and also the increasingly volatile political effects of that inequality — the report argues that American economists have not been at the forefront of studying the distribution of wealth and income. Most of the cutting edge work has been often led by researchers from different national and cultural backgrounds.

While it’s encouraging to note that many of those cited in the piece as exemplary path-breakers in the field, such Gabriel Zucman, Steven Fazzari, and James K. Galbraith, have been supported by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, it may be overstating the case to say that American economists have not been cognizant of inequality — the widening of the wealth and income gap over the past 30 years has hardly gone unnoticed. Still, it is probably true to suggest that most explanations offered for the phenomenon have cited some combination of differential investments in human capital and/or technological changes as being primary drivers. There have always, of course, been dissenters from this approach, but analyses that identified macroeconomic factors such as weak labor markets or political factors such as the rise of a financial class remained minority views.

What is notable about some of the new research commended by the Atlantic for more boldly tackling the more politically challenging aspects of inequality is that this work has given more central causal weight to macroeconomic policy and factors such as the declining bargaining power of labor vs. capital.

For many years, to cite one example, labor shares and their decline were either treated as an artifact of the way data is collected, or as marginal to economic analysis. In the recent past however, a spate of influential papers have returned to the question of the capital-labor relations and shares of output going to each. Other influential papers have implicated the enormous growth of the financial sector as important features in the landscape of U.S. inequality. The centrality of the balance of political power in shaping income distribution was certainly a feature of U.S. academic economics until the 1980s, and work in this tradition has continued at the margins. But the new research being hailed by the Atlantic is restoring the centrality of such concerns. Economics, and the society it purports to serve, can only benefit from that development.

Labor Compensation and Labor Productivity

Just a quick reminder:

More here: Labor Compensation and Labor Productivity: Recent Recoveries and the Long-Term Trend, B. Ravikumar and Lin Shao, St. Louis Fed

Drivers of inequality: Trade Shocks Versus Top Marginal Tax Rates

Douglas Campbell and Lester Lusher at VoxEU:

Drivers of inequality: Trade shocks versus top marginal tax rates: Growing wealth inequality has been one of the most pressing political issues since the Great Recession. However, there is a relative lack of consensus on the significant drivers of this trend. This column investigates the contribution of globalization, via international trade, to US wealth inequality. Although trade is found to have had important effects on certain parts of the US labor market in the early 2000s, the growth in US inequality since 1980 can be traced back to Reagan-era tax cuts. ...