Comments on: Is the American Income Gap Exceptional?

By: decius

decius — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 08:52:00 +0000

Some people are 50, some are 70; why is 24 years less arbitrary than 50 or 70?

Why didn’t differential economic policy make a significant difference for the last 100 years, but did from 1980-1990?

By: Jonathan Perrine

Jonathan Perrine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 08:22:00 +0000

Unfortunately, Society Pages can’t do all the work. It wouldn’t be hard to look up, say, tax rates, entitlement plans, and economic decisions for these countries.

By: Jonathan Perrine

Jonathan Perrine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 08:21:00 +0000

That Cherry-picked 24 year span is, you know, the lifetime of some people and a direct statistic based on their personal welfare, through no action of their own, but the policies adopted by the country they live in. it also happens to be up to the current time. I’d hardly call that arbitrary.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 20:40:00 +0000

So where’s the graph of economic policy over time, by country?

By: Alvin_purple

Alvin_purple — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 09:26:00 +0000

Because progressivism is a largely twentieth century phenomenon, as is social welfare. The U.S. during the early part of the century, while not having the same ideas of welfare as a human right that developed in Europe and elsewhere, still followed policies that lead to income equality. Only from the late 1970s and early 80s do we see neo-liberal fiscal policies take over, with a corresponding jump in income disparity. This is a global trend, but is more pronounced in the U.S., which explains the broad similarity in trends across countries as well as the larger increase in the U.S. than elsewhere.

To suggest that the broad similarity between trends argues against national policies being causative rests on the assumption that America has always followed the same neo-liberal monetarist laissez-faire policies as at present, when this isn’t the case. The broad trends should appear largely the same, but the increasing gapfrom 1980 would generally agree with the more dramatic change in economic doctrine since then than seen elsewhere in the developed world.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:13:00 +0000

So, if the trends are different, why is there a consistent downward trend across countries, with outliers, before the 1960’s, a consistent flat trend until the 1980’s, and a consistent rising trend until the present? The overall trend is the same, even if a cherry-picked 24 year-over-year trend shows a 50% difference.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 17:59:00 +0000

You also have to take the poitn of reference into account. The analysis of these graphs are focusing on the difference between countries, but it would be incorrect to think that just because it happens all over the western world it’s independent of politics.

But in fact there *has* been a change in policy over the past 20 years. At least in Sweden there has been a very clear right turn, with the liberal party winning the election twice in a row for the first time in 70 years, and with economic liberalism taking hold even in the socialist party long before that. Taxes are being cut, state owned services sold out and reforms are made that favor the rich at the expence of the welfare system. This does affect income equality, and with right wing rhetoric gainign popularity all over Europe, it is hardly an isolated case.