Afternoon Must-Read: Carter Price: Why Should Policymakers Care About Economic Inequality?
If you did not see this when it came whizzing by, go take a look:
Why should policymakers care about economic inequality?: “It was long assumed [not just that] economic growth led to less economic inequality…
…but also that any economic policy efforts to alleviate inequality would necessarily slow economic growth. These views, however, were formed in an era before there was sufficient data to truly test this view…. In an early survey… Roland Benabou at Princeton University in 1996 found that the vast majority of studies said high and rising inequality harmed economic growth…. Sarah Voitchovsky… find[s]… substantial disagreement about the relationship between inequality and growth…. Recent work by… Andrew Berg, Jonathan Ostry, and Charalombos Tsangaridis… Roy van der Weide… and Branko Milanovic of the City University of New York have robustly found a negative relationship between economic inequality for developed countries and within the United States…. Other studies find that a highly skewed distribution of income and wealth depresses consumption… leading to unsustainably excessive borrowing…”