Inequality

If you want to know how much income inequality has really risen in recent years, Scott Winship has written a terrific short essay summarizing much of what we now know. And what we know is that almost the entire increase in inequality since the 1980s is attributable to a stupendous rise in incomes at the [...]

I see that segments of the discussion of inequality between me and Jonathan Chait are up at the New Republic website. You’ll find the links in the column to the right side of the video player.

Matt Yglesias and Conor Clarke seem to see the same upshot as Chait in the idea that rich people spend way more than poor people for stuff that isn’t that much better. Here’s Yglesias:
[T]he point here is that the marginal utility of money income declines as it grows. This is also a strong argument for [...]

Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey is one of my favorite scholars. The abstract from his new paper [gated] on “Globalization and Inequality: Explaining American Exceptionalism” will sound familiar to readers of other eminent Princetonians, such as Paul Krugman and Larry Bartels. I’m starting to think of it as “the Princeton Narrative” about inequality in the U.S. 
Globalization [...]

In his interesting post responding to Brink’s new Nostalgianomics paper, Matt Yglesias writes:
I think that in a lot of ways the most interesting recent research on inequality turns out to be about skill-biased technological change after all. Specifically, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz argue in The Race Between Education and Technology that we shouldn’t look at SBTC [...]