Thursday, March 30, 2017

Pavlina Tcherneva — Inequality Update: Who Gains When Income Grows?


Lotsa charts and graphs. The above presents the general picture. The top of the town is doing great; "the little people," not so much.

Probably the chief reason that Donald Trump won the election. 

The establishment Democrats, living in their latté liberal bubble, thought that "everyone" was doing great under President Obama. NOT.

New Economic Perspectives
Inequality Update: Who Gains When Income Grows?
Pavlina Tcherneva | Assistant Professor of Economics at Bard College, Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute, and Senior Research Associate at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability

5 comments:

Magpie said...

It's interesting that Prof. Tcherneva writes, referring to figure 1:

The chart illustrates that with every postwar expansion, as the economy grew, the bottom 90% of households received a smaller and smaller share of that growth. Even though their share was falling, the majority of families still captured the majority of the income growth until the 70s.

That applies, as well, to the more recent and updated figure 2.

Note that the period when the bottom 90% of households started receiving "a smaller and smaller share of that growth" includes the first 6 bars: 1949-1953, 1954-1957, 1958-1960, 1961-1969, 1970-1973, and 1975-1979. That was the Keynesian golden age of enlightened capitalism, industrial capitalism, or trente glorieuses.

True, that beats the current situation. After all during the trente glorieuses the bottom 90% still captured the largest part of the growth, but it was already a declining proportion.

Peter Pan said...

Who gains when clean water and sanitation are brought to a town or village?

Noah Way said...

@Bob, the privatized corporate providers, of course. Or they will when the transition is complete. Which is why existing infrastructure is being run into the ground.

Magpie said...

Bob said...

Who gains when clean water and sanitation are brought to a town or village?

Noah Way said...

@Bob, the privatized corporate providers, of course.

Well, in fairness, one would have to admit that the public wins, as well.

The thing is that the public would have won even if the providers had not been privatised and corporate. In fact, the public could have even won more.

Peter Pan said...

What I wanted to point out is that the public can benefit in ways that won't show up as increased income. Infrastructure improvements were an important factor during the 'Golden Age' of capitalism.

Nowadays, the newest fad is PPP (Private Public Plundering).