Inequality

Ezra Klein writes:
But since we justify income inequality by understanding success as an outcome of virtue, there’s a tendency to ascribe achievement to diligent effort rather than the market’s amoral decisions to attach high value to certain spheres of labor and low value to others. The important variable for success, however, does not seem to be [...]

Jim Manzi has graciously replied to my inequality post below. Let me just reply to this one bit now, and I’ll take up his worries about the threat of the angry mob later.
I think the reason this indicates that inequality poses “more of a political problem for Republican coalition-building than it does for the Democrats” [...]

Here’s the working paper [pdf] by Enrico Moretti at Berkeley:
Abstract. A large literature has documented a significant increase in the return to college over the past 30 years. This increase is typically measured using nominal wages. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas that are characterized by [...]

Please listen to Christian Broda, from this profile in the American :
We are underestimating the gains from trade…The current statistical interpretation ignores the fact that a poor household today can access goods that, in the 1960s, they could not—microwaves, DVDs—and, more importantly, that the prices of the staples that lower-income households consume have also gone [...]

This is the sort of thing that makes the vein in Krugman’s forehead throb:
When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly — by 84% to 13% — prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States [...]

Tim Lee continues to preach it over at TPMCafe
For reasons that aren’t clear to me, a lot of people seem to have a very different intuition when we’re talking about the distribution of dollars rather than eyeballs or Wikipedia edits. The mere existence of growing income inequality is treated as a prima facie evidence of [...]