"The Unheavenly Chorus is the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests--membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on numerous in-depth surveys of members of the public as well as the largest database of interest organizations ever created--representing more than thirty-five thousand organizations over a twenty-five-year period--this book conclusively demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. The well educated and affluent are active in many ways to make their voices heard, while the less advantaged are not. This book reveals how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down across generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities--and more."

"Although most U.S. income inequality research is based on public use March CPS data, a new wave of research using IRS tax return data reports substantially faster inequality growth for recent years. We show that these apparently inconsistent estimates are largely reconciled when the income distribution and inequality are defined the same way. Using internal CPS data for 1967 to 2006, we show that CPS-based estimates of top income shares are similar to IRS data-based estimates reported by Piketty and Saez (2003). Our results imply that income inequality changes since 1993 are largely driven by changes in incomes of the top 1%."

Wilkinson [excuse me, "W.W."] is no idiot, but look at what his commitments are forcing him into here: he's allying himself with someone whose racial politics _he_ describes as "toxic", and endorsing inherited privilege because reasons, that's why. In other words, he's agreeing with Flynn that meritocracy is sociologically incoherent, and embracing its devolution into aristocracy, if it can be used to upset enough liberals, and ennoble enough proles to damp down unrest.

"I don't know exactly what to do, but when I look around at yet another room packed with white guys in black t-shirts, I know we're screwing up."

"There is no plausible way based on these data in which elites can be considered a Democratic voting bloc. To create a group of strongly Democratic-leaning elite whites using these graphs, you would need to consider only postgraduates (no simple college grads included, even if they have achieved social and financial success), and you have to go down to the below-$75,000 level of family income, which hardly seems like the American elites to me."

Preach it, sister!

"So here’s a riddle: which form of technology should we prefer, labor saving or labor complementary? Labor saving technology is consistent with high wages and tight labor markets. But it also, of course, leads to less jobs overall in the sectors where it is deployed. Which brings us back to the homeless people with hotspots. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that this is a legitimately profit-making business venture rather than a weird kind of charity. (And note that even as charity, the project depends on its consumers viewing it as a kind of legitimate business, a way for the homeless to engage in “productive” labor.) Putting hotspots on homeless people has to count as a labor complementary technology. From the standpoint of the wireless company, the marginal product of a homeless person’s labor is much higher (i.e., it’s non-zero) once you’ve figured out that you can attach hotspots to them. So if you think that it’s bad when machines replace human labor (which is not what I think), then this is just the kind of technical change you should prefer.
"But labor complementary technology doesn’t necessarily look so great once you’re face-to-face with the kind of labor it complements. In this case, it relies upon the existence of a cheap and exploitable labor force—something that’s obvious when you’re looking at a homeless person in a creepy t-shirt, less so when you order from an online retailer. And here’s where I think a lot of the outrage over homeless-people-as-infrastructure goes wrong.
"I don’t recall seeing a lot of complaints about the problem of homelessness in Austin prior to this story. Which I don’t mean as some kind of “gotcha”—the world is full of horrible things, and it’s neither possible nor particularly helpful to try to talk about all of them all of the time. But to get up in arms about an ad agency exploiting the homeless as wifi routers strikes me as a peculiarly half-assed form of outrage. If they weren’t walking around as billboards for wireless service, Austin’s homeless and poor would still be homeless and perhaps a bit more poor. The fundamental problem here is not exploitation, but the condition of possibility for that exploitation, which is the fact that there are so many poor and homeless Americans in the first place.
"“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”, goes the old adage from Joan Robinson. Then again, says Marx, “to be a productive laborer is not a piece of luck, but a misfortune. In the short run, labor complementary technology may employ more people, which is better than them not being exploited at all. But in the long run, the jobs thus created tend to be terrible, and our real goal ought to be to channel technical change toward labor saving innovation.
"This leaves us with the question of what the homeless of Austin can demand, if not the right to be walking 4G hotspots. Fortunately there is a simple solution to that. There’s nothing (economically) stopping us from just giving people cash; and as the housing activist Max Rameau likes to say, the cause of homelessness is that people don’t have homes, and we have plenty of those. So imagine what would happen if this pool of cheap, easily exploitable labor wasn’t available. A company that wanted to sell 4G wireless services might have to invest in more transmitters to fulfill demand. Or perhaps they would deploy robots to roll around the streets selling wireless access! This would not employ as many people, since it’s more a labor saving than a labor complementary technology. But it also wouldn’t create the grotesque spectacle of fellow human beings serving as pieces of infrastructure."

"Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed."

"Aaaaaaand that’s then I want to start pressing the “It’s time for the goddamned revolution” button. By the time we get to the breakdowns of the monthly expenses of the seven 1% households profiled for the article, which features line items like $800 a month on wine and $1200 for the vacation house on the lake, I’m vaguely surprised Toronto isn’t on fire. The only people I feel any sort of commonality with are the immigrant family, who pack their own lunches for work and aside from the hair salon line item seem to have some perspective on their cash. The retired couple who invested well and are living off the proceeds also gets a pass, because, hey, that’s the goal, right? Otherwise: Purification by flame."

"To understand what Murray does in Coming Apart, imagine this analogy: A social scientist visits a Gulf Coast town. He notices that the houses near the water have all been smashed and shattered. The former occupants now live in tents and FEMA trailers. The social scientist writes a report: 'The evidence strongly shows that living in houses is better for children and families than living in tents and trailers. The people on the waterfront are irresponsibly subjecting their children to unacceptable conditions.'
"When he publishes his report, somebody points out: "You know, there was a hurricane here last week." The social scientist shrugs off the criticism with the reply, "I'm writing about housing, not weather." "

---All parts of Frum's review are worth reading.

"Fukuyama's would-be allies in the business world haven't developed what you could call a coherent plan of attack. They have relatively little to say about the political side of the changes they seek. But they do have energy, optimism, and something of the utopian spirit that's at the heart of most successful social movements.... In the more obviously troubled circumstances of 2012, the business gurus have toned down the technological determinism a little bit. But they're still trying to point the way to a new, better world. You can call this a hopeful sign or a scary one (that Marx stuff didn't work out so well, remember). In any case, it's worth paying attention to."

Occupy Management Consulting is not going to fly, I think.

See if the analysis holds up after tracking down paper and if data is available; if so may make it an assignment (or even an exam?) for uADA.

"The problem with a rights-based liberalism is precisely that it is not and never can be the end of history, that it is never secure or stable, that every liberty claimed through toil and protest, no matter how acclaimed and cherished and generative, is one day away from the firing line when some powerful interest decides that some right or practice is inconvenient.

"It doesn’t even matter if the end of a right, a freedom, a possibility will ultimately hurt that powerful interest. The contemporary businesses who have registered a powerful stake in exceptionally restrictive monopolies over intellectual property have themselves been enormous beneficiaries of a conception of the public domain as a fundamental and irreversible right of a free society. No matter: they would now see it ended. Better to kill the future than live in a present where you can only have two Ferraris in the driveway."

"The point is that these are pure fantasies on the part of the right. The true age of spectacular growth in the United States and other advanced economies was the generation after World War II, with post-Reagan growth nowhere near comparable. So why do these people imagine otherwise?

And the answer, once you think about it, is obvious: growth for whom? There’s only one way in which the post-deregulation boom was exceptional, and that’s in terms of the growth in incomes at the top of the scale.

Here’s a comparison of the postwar boom with the deregulation alleged boom, using real average family income from the Census and real average income for the top 1 percent from Piketty and Saez:

[graph omitted]

If you’re looking at the average, the last generation is a poor shadow of the postwar boom. But if you’re talking about the 1 percent, wonderful things have happened."

"The big gains have gone to the top 0.1 percent. So income inequality in America really is about oligarchs versus everyone else. When the Occupy Wall Street people talk about the 99 percent, they’re actually aiming too low."

Possible computational project: code up estimating a Pareto tail for income (all sources) from these statistics, and tracking evolution over time (and perhaps across countries).

Or, an ADA project, suggested by conversation with John B.: look for correlation between (lack of) progressive taxation and job creation, as predicted by the usual right-wing suspects.

(checks table) Yep, this applies.

"Apparently the demonstrators have had some unkind words to say about capitalism. I have my doubts as to whether very many of them are serious about wanting to abolish it. Put me down as opposing any effort to overthrow capitalism in America. But American capitalism is overdue for reform more drastic than anything under current consideration within the polite mainstream. As I've been trying to point out lately, many of the more forceful criticisms are coming from the capitalists themselves. We need to resist tax simplification if it means reducing rather than increasing the number of tax brackets, because as the income share of the top 1 percent increases new tax brackets are needed for the highest incomes just to keep up. We need to revive the private-sector labor movement in this country, a goal most mainstream liberals are unwilling to take seriously. We need to break up the biggest banks, so that we won't be in danger of having to bail them out again in the future. We need to impose some form of federal price controls on college tuition increases, because, like health care, higher education has unmoored itself from the laws of supply and demand. I promise you the liberal establishment at college campuses across the country isn't going to take that one sitting down.

A year ago I wrote, from my former perch at Slate: "Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation's income, yet the prospect of class warfare is utterly remote. Indeed, the political question foremost in Washington's mind is how thoroughly the political party more closely associated with the working class (that would be the Democrats) will get clobbered in the next election. Why aren't the bottom 99 percent marching in the streets?" Well, now they are marching in the streets, waving signs that say "We Are The Bottom 99 Percent." Do I wish they were paying more attention to the Federal Register so they could properly support the writing of forceful regulations under the undeniably valuable Dodd-Frank financial reforms? Of course. Do I wish they'd stop occasionally trying to perform the latter-day equivalent of trying to levitate the Pentagon? What do you think? But until they give me a concrete reason to feel otherwise, I'll be glad that protesters are finally taking notice of America's 30-year income-inequality binge. It's long overdue."

"... the first comprehensive analysis of an economic trend that has been reshaping the United States over the past three decades: rapidly rising income inequality. ... overview of how and why the level and distribution of income and wealth has changed since 1979, sets this situation within its historical context, and investigates the forces that are driving it. Among other factors, Blank looks closely at changes within families, including women’s increasing participation in the work force. The book includes some surprising findings—for example, that per-person income has risen sharply among almost all social groups, even as income has become more unequally distributed. Looking toward the future, Blank suggests that while rising inequality will likely be with us for many decades to come, it is not an inevitable outcome. Her book considers what can be done to address this trend, and also explores the question: why should we be concerned about this phenomenon?"

"Try to imagine a utopian version of earth in which everyone on the planet can obtain the material living standards of the average contemporary Dutch person without doing any paid labor. Well some people are going to be enjoying the life of leisure from a nice villa in the Tuscan countryside or from the stunning beaches of the Caribbean while others will be less-fortunately situated in Arkhangelsk or the suburbs of Houston."

"Between 1947 and 1973, GDP per family increased at a rate of 2.6% per year and median family income grew at 2.7% per year. From 1973 to 2007, GDP per family increased at 1.7% per year, but median family income grew at just 0.7% per year.
And note the absolute numbers: GDP per family rose by $52,000 during 1947-73 and then by $82,000 during 1973-2007. Median family income increased by $26,000 during 1947-73 but then by just $13,000 in 1973-2007.
Median family income was $64,000 in 2007. Had it kept pace with GDP per family since the mid-1970s, it instead would have been around $90,000.
I’m all for helping to accelerate the rate of innovation. But the big change in recent decades lies in the degree to which economic growth lifts middle-class incomes. If we want to understand slow income growth, that should be our focus."

"At long last, then: all this is to not to deny that the rich, many of them, haven’t done impressive things that have in many cases dramatically improved one aspect or another of human experience.

It is to say that they have already been very richly rewarded for their accomplishments, that even the most original of them have reached their happy state within a framework of public goods, owned in common, and paid-for-by-others – and to note that a substantial proportion of them have less reason than others to claim particular personal credit for their fortunate situation.

And that in that context, being obscenely wealthy ought to be its own reward; taxation the fortunate result of success and the down payment made on future prosperity. It is the price owed, not confiscated, to support a system, a government and a society that however imperfectly did and does so much to create the opportunities in which many of these folks got so rich."

This, this, this.

Income inequality as functionally a tax on the lower percentiles of the population (with dubious benefits in exchange).

"Questioning prevailing culture-based theories—and the academics who perpetuate them—that are used to explain India's poverty and its hampered development, Gupta attempts to "normalize" India, advocating a rigorous rejection of justifications that rely upon cultural otherness and exoticization. He critically examines the reluctance to acknowledge that structural impediments, not cultural factors, deny growth benefits to the majority of Indians, and explores the close link between growth in high technology sectors of the Indian economy on one side and sweat shops and rural stagnation on the other. Making a comparison with the developed West, Gupta underscores the point that affluence can be achieved only after living conditions improve across all social classes."

David Brooks is an idiot with no grasp of what American society is like or has been like; in other news, water is wet.

Teaser for their book, as published in _Annual Review of Sociology_.

Not a group of tags I ever expected to have occasion to type.

The Rajan book sounds interesting.

"the real meaning of social democracy for a developed country—you get more equality and more vacation, with no real impact on the rate of growth. There’s a case to be made that less vacation and better televisions are a better deal than more vacation and worse televisions (the two things I like to do on vacation are go to Europe and watch TV, so I have mixed feelings about this) and there’s a tradition of philosophical argument which holds that the failure of modern mixed economies to be sufficiently solicitous of the interests of the wealthy is a major source of injustice. But though some level of income inequality would seem to be necessary to achieve economic growth, within the range that actual developed countries exist at there’s no evidence that inegalitarian policies boost growth."

Causal inference FAIL.

"Chung and Cox (1994) provided an intuitively appealing stochastic model indicating that superstars may exist regardless of talent, giving rise to the Yule distribution. We adopt a different empirical approach and test its goodness of fit using a parametric bootstrap and several powerful test statistics. Just like the discrete Pareto distribution, it is overwhelmingly rejected: it is a fairly accurate approximation of the lower quantiles of the superstar distribution but overestimates the snowball effect that makes consumers purchase records of the most successful artists. In other words, the Yule distribution captures stardom, but not superstardom. A generalization of the Yule distribution provides an excellent fit in two of the three data sets." --- We only seem to subscribe with a one-issue delay (?); preprint at http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0658.pdf

Lowering global GDP by 5% can be achieved by eliminating countries which have over 40% of the world's population. Now, if one wanted to follow this particular line of madness to its end, you'd have to include the cost to richer countries of trade disruption (e.g., we might have to pay more for tea and commodity software without India, more for t-shirts without Bangladesh, more for coffee without Malawi) --- but the point is clear.

Sure. But: "Examined broadly, the history of manual labor in this country doesn't suggest that physical jobs secured more respect by convincing people of their complexity. They secured more respect by unionizing, and thus becoming good, even coveted, positions."

"Common People", covered by Archie comics. Even funnier if you imagine Wm. Shatner doing the vocals.

Origins of the present troubles. --- Somewhat surprisingly, I mostly agree with this.

Fairly recent (2006) textbook, looks decent.

"The Concentration of Wealth, Its Causes and Results". Interesting pre-Pareto statistics on wealth concentration in the late 19th century US. Tabulations are by divisions into discrete classes, but sometimes with multiplicatively-increasing cut-offs. I wonder if P. tried a plot of something like this first?

(Divide through for the (small r-) republican boilerplate about how great inequality caused the ancient empires to fall, etc. I'd contend that extremely gross inequality is the normal historical condition for state societies. It doesn't make them nicer places to live in, but it's certainly sustainable.)

Inequality has risen in America because of political and institutional shifts. (Can you say "class struggle"? I knew you could.) Attempts to pretend that it is due to exogenous economic forces (patterns of trade, returns on education a.k.a. "skill-biased technological change") are at best underinformed, and in the case of people who should know better, such as economists, more likely disingenuous.

Was I the only one who read this and then thought "I can't wait to see what Tanta has to say about this?"

"Their combined income of nearly a quarter-million dollars last year was five times the median household income for Wasilla's 7,000 residents. They own a single-engine plane, two boats, two personal watercraft and a half-million-dollar, custom-built home on a lake that is worth three times the average of other homes in town." Ackerman's comment is only too acute: "I look forward to hearing how class should be defined entirely culturally."

Andrew Gelman et al.'s forthcoming book about American voting habits.

Requires knowing the fraction of the population and the fraction of total income (or mean income) in each bin. Implemented in CRAN (ineq)

Good piece on links between manufacturing, education, urban revitalization & social capital. Stupid title.

"Millions of years ago, some ancestral human developed a strange social adaptation geared at rising up against The Man." Or, Sam Bowles as the social-democratic, social-scientific Nietzsche.

Now, where did I put the twin study on how executive function is 100% heritable?