Economic Links

Here's an excellent piece from Sunday's NY Times comparing the growth in societal equality with the concurrent decline in economic equality in the United States.

It's a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream. At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.

Sociologist Jerome Karabel's explanation is that no “advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition.”

Meanwhile, the Wall St. Journal ran a piece discussing the increasing volatility of wealth in America: at the same time that the incomes of the top 1% began to take off, those same incomes started to rise and dip far more than other Americans'.  The piece also looks at the unfinished 90,000 square foot house in Florida that would have been the largest in the country.

A new poll on the Occupy Wall Street movement finds that 32% approve, 29% disapprove, and 40% don't have an opinion:

But opinions are clear about Wall Street itself. Eight in ten say Wall Street bankers are greedy, 77% say they're overpaid, and two-thirds say Wall Street bankers are dishonest, a number that has gone up by a third in roughly two decades.

Economists say the next decade will bring many new jobs for machines, but few for people.

Nick Kristof argues that the real solution to income inequality in this country is intensive early childhood education.

Here's a report comparing growth in inequality across OECD countries