Kevin Williamson writes What to Do About Wages in The National Review. Excerpts: There are basically three ways to raise incomes. The first is through capital investment that raises the value of labor. But capital investment also replaces labor in many instances,
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Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: Well, no. In fact, the Billy Zane character was an entirely fictional creation of James Cameron’s imagination (and the proper spelling of his name is Hockley;
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From Kevin Williamson at National Review Online, Downscale Big government is bad for the little guy. Excerpt: On the one hand, we have the small-town entrepreneur yearning for sidewalks and streetlights; on the other, we have dodgy “Five Aces” federal contracts and
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Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: Homburg, the American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett, and a team at the Sciences Po in Paris, moreover, argue that the recent widening of the wealth-to-income gap
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From my article in American Thinker, Everything that Counts” excerpt: When Piketty suggests that we tax the wealth of the richest, exactly what does he think will happen to it? The government will spend it – but on what? Does he
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Chicago and Black Criminality Many places with less-restrictive gun laws have less gun violence than Chicago, which already sports some of the toughest gun restrictions in the country. The gun-ownership rate in rural areas is higher than in urban areas—a
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from Mark Perry at Carpe Diem, Sorry Krugman, Piketty and Stiglitz: Income inequality for individual Americans has been flat for more than 50 years MP: This is a very important finding that: a) individual income inequality has been flat for more
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Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: A third claim—one can’t call them arguments because they don’t rise to that level—is that the super rich will rig democracy to their advantage. This, too,
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Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: “The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying,” Piketty writes. For instance, Piketty fears that whenever the return on capital really
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Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: The most common and strongest complaint is that Piketty’s arrangement of the data paints a false picture of rising inequality in the United States. Harvard’s
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From my article in American Thinker, Everything that Counts: Vast inequalities may harbor the potential for social unrest, but that is muted by social mobility. Oprah and Andre Young (Dr. Dre) may have been born in poverty, but that has
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from John Steele Gordon in The Wall Street Journal, The Little Miracle Spurring Inequality Excerpts: The great growth of fortunes in recent decades is not a sinister development. Instead it is simply the inevitable result of an extraordinary technological innovation,
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Dr. Dre (stage name for Andre Young) has hit the jackpot. From very modest beginning in Compton, California to success as a rap star to entrepreneur in the development of Beats headphones, he has discovered a market niche- high end
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from Sarah Hoyt, Tiddlywinks — Threat or Menace? Look, guys, yes, some societies have been more egalitarian than others – mostly very poor societies are egalitarian because everyone is poor. – pioneer societies tend to be more “equal” because everyone
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From Michael Barone at National Review- Equality at the Expense of Prosperity: “There’s a persistent tension,” writes Bloomberg’s Clive Crook, “between the limits of the data [Piketty] presents and the grandiosity of the conclusions he draws.” Like global-warming alarmists, he extrapolates from
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Kevin Williamson writes Welcome to the Paradise of the Real in The National Review Online. It is a bit long but quite worthy of the time to read it in its entirety. Excerpts: With economic models, we are a little
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Economist Mark Perry writes in his blog Carpe Diem, Evidence shows significant mobility in income and affluence – 73% of Americans will be in ‘top 20%’ for at least a year: Excerpts: quoted from Mark Rank from the New York Times,
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Do people mind more about inequality than poverty? from Matt Ridley at his blog The Rational Optimist Excerpt: If you measure consumption inequality, it is far lower than pre-tax income inequality, because the top 40 per cent of earners pay more
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John Goodman from Townhall writes A Personal Note on Inequality: First, I made a rough calculation that between 5% and 10% of our class was earning about half the class income. Obviously, my calculation was far from precise, but I
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Daniel Greenfield writes The Poverty of Inequality in Sultan Knish. Excerpts: The left does hate people who work for a living. The poster child for its childish screeds is Elizabeth Warren, a populist voice of the people who spent three-quarters of a million on
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Relativity of Wealth
Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: Well, no. In fact, the Billy Zane character was an entirely fictional creation of James Cameron’s imagination (and the proper spelling of his name is Hockley;