ICYMI: Milanović on how US income distribution changed between 2007 and 2013

Branko Milanović – How US income distribution changed between 2007 and 2013:

As one would expect, this new interest in the matters of distribution has proven to be politically very contentious. And since people have strong political opinions and since income and wealth inequality have become the topic of the day, many people who otherwise never dabbled in income distribution have had their field day. This is best seen in the proliferation of income, consumption and wealth measures. I have written a bit on it here, and I do not want to go into all details of definitions in this short post. But some people have acted as if no standards existed on how income and income distributions are measured. More than half-a-century of work on the topic was ignored (or more likely, those who wrote about it did not even know it existed), Thus all kinds of bizarre measures have been proposed as if the entire corpus of knowledge had to be reinvented, or as if America were an island which needs to have its own measures of income and inequality unrelated to what is done in the rest of the world. One could, I guess, as well start inventing American concept of Gross Domestic Product.

 

Read more here.

February 23, 2015

Topics

Economic Inequality

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