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Posts Tagged ‘inequality’

How the New Model of Marriage May Drive Income Inequality

Our last two podcasts, “Why Marry?” (Part 1 and Part 2) explored the broad and deep changes in the institution of marriage. One theme was that the old marriage model of “production complementaries” has shifted to one based on “consumption complementarities.” Here’s Justin Wolfers on the subject:

We have more time, more money, and so you want to spend it with someone that you’ll enjoy. So, similar interests and passions. We call this the model of hedonic marriage. But really it’s a lot more familiar than that. This is just economists giving a jargon name to love. So you want someone who’s actually remarkably similar to you or has similar passions that you do. So it fundamentally changes who marries who.

But is this change also related to income inequality? Wolfers briefly referenced that idea a few years back; in a recent article for Vox, the economics Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov, and Cezar Santos further the argument:


Stiglitz on the Singapore Miracle

Joseph Stiglitz writes an economic valentine to Singapore that is full of interesting facts and conclusions. In a nutshell: for the past few decades, Singapore has pursued a strong economy that is also concerned with equality from top to bottom. The piece is interesting throughout, especially for anyone whose mind still summons the words “chewing gum” as soon as the word Singapore appears. The piece is hard to excerpt — you should read the whole thing — because there are so many discrete points. But here are a few samples:

Singapore has had the distinction of having prioritized social and economic equity while achieving very high rates of growth over the past 30 years — an example par excellence that inequality is not just a matter of social justice but of economic performance. Societies with fewer economic disparities perform better — not just for those at the bottom or the middle, but over all.

And:

The government mandated that individuals save into a “provident fund” — 36 percent of the wages of young workers — to be used to pay for adequate health care, housing and retirement benefits. It provided universal education, sent some of its best students abroad, and did what it could to make sure they returned. (Some of my brightest students came from Singapore.)


How Much Financial Inequality Is Due to Financial Illiteracy?

Annamaria Lusardi, whose ground-breaking research on financial literacy has been featured here several times, has put out a new working paper (with co-authors Pierre-Carl Michaud and Olivia S. Mitchell) that could be read as laying much of the blame for the lack of household wealth at the foot of the members of said household. The paper is called “Optimal Financial Knowledge and Wealth Inequality” (abstract; PDF):

While financial knowledge is strongly positively related to household wealth, there is also considerable cross-sectional variation in both financial knowledge and net asset levels.  To explore these patterns, we develop a calibrated stochastic life cycle model featuring endogenous financial knowledge accumulation.  The model generates substantial wealth inequality, over and above that of standard life cycle models; this is because higher earners typically have more hump-shaped labor income profiles and lower retirement benefits which, when interacted with precautionary saving motives, boost their need for private wealth accumulation and thus financial knowledge.

Our simulations show that endogenous financial knowledge accumulation has the potential to account for a large proportion of wealth inequality. 


Will Capitalism Survive?

Will modern capitalism survive this financial crisis? The Occupy protesters camped out around the country may hope that it won’t, at least not in its current form. Economist Kenneth Rogoff sees few alternatives, but plenty of challenges to the system in a new essay for Project Syndicate:

I am often asked if the recent global financial crisis marks the beginning of the end of modern capitalism. It is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable replacement waiting in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to today’s dominant Anglo-American paradigm are other forms of capitalism.


Did Gender Inequality Start With the Plow?

From a pair of Harvard economists, Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn, and a UCLA business school professor, Paola Giuliano, comes this working paper (Abstract here and below; full version here) that tests the hypothesis that current gender role differences can be traced to shifting methods of agriculture, particularly the introduction of the plow, which required significant upper body strength, grip strength, and burst of power that favored men over women.


Attitudes Towards Poverty

At a seminar in Germany last week, a statistical difference illustrated a crucial E.U.-U.S. difference in politico-economic attitudes. In the U.S., we define the poverty line as absolute: three times the income needed for a minimally nutritious food budget. In Europe, the poverty line is based on relative income, typically 50 percent of the median income.


Why Income Inequality Matters

The Economist complements this week’s print issue on rising income inequality with an online forum on the subject. Daron Acemoglu explains why we care about income inequality: “First, people’s well-being may directly depend on inequality, for example, because they view a highly unequal society as unfair or because the utility loss due to low status of the have-nots may be greater than the utility gain due to the higher status of the haves. Second and more importantly, equality of opportunity may be harder to achieve in an unequal society … Third and most importantly, inequality impacts politics. Economic power tends to beget political power even in democratic and pluralistic societies.”


Congratulations Fran Blau!

Fran Blau is one of my favorite labor economists in the world: She’s smart, savvy, tackles important problems, and also incredibly generous in helping younger scholars and colleagues with their own research. She is now also the winner of this year’s IZA Prize in Labor Economics.


Equality or Flexibility?

Transactions costs are involved in most small-scale activities we engage in. Living in a country, and coping with its institutions, also involves transaction costs.


The Next Time Someone Tells You That Taxes Are Not Progressive …

… you can show them this chart, courtesy of the Congressional Budget Office, via Greg Mankiw: Lowest quintile: 4.3 percent Second quintile: 9.9 percent Middle quintile: 14.2 percent Fourth quintile: 17.4 percent Percentiles 81-90: 20.3 percent Percentiles 91-95: 22.4 percent Percentiles 96-99: 25.7 percent Percentiles 99.0-99.5: 29.7 percent Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 31.2 percent Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 32.1 percent Top 0.01 Percentile: 31.5 . . .


Poor People With Checks

What kind of people use check-cashing places? How do they work? Do such places contribute to inequality? And most important — why are people paying for their own money? In their video “Checkmate,” the Internets Celebrities, a.k.a. Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam, explore these questions and eventually, in their words, “make it rain.”


Shattering the Conventional Wisdom on Growing Inequality

Inequality is growing in the United States. The data say so. Knowledgeable experts like Ben Bernanke say so. Ask just about any economist and they will agree. (They may or may not think growing inequality is a problem, but they will acknowledge that there has been a sharp increase in inequality.) Photo: Jim, Wal-Mart Supercenter in Suwanee, Georgia. According to . . .


Paul Krugman Hits the Blogosphere Running

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman kicked off his new blog a couple days ago with a long entry on inequality. While economists are well aware of the patterns in inequality, there is less agreement concerning the reasons for its ups and downs. Krugman believes that the primary factor driving inequality is politics. I suspect that most economists would disagree. . . .