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May 31, 2003 INCOME INEQUALITY....David Adesnik pulls this quote out of a Business Week article:
This
goes to the heart of whether you think increasing income inequality is a
problem. I think it's quite true that as our economy has become
increasingly reliant on brainpower it has naturally rewarded smart
college graduates far more than any other group. There are two basic
reactions to this:
The free market does indeed reward certain classes of people far more than others, and it's not just the risk-taking entrepreneurs. The question is, do you think this trend toward increasing inequality should be allowed to play itself out naturally? Or do you think it's going to lead to some pretty serious problems? UPDATE: Dan Drezner's take on income inequality is here. He gets the "income mobility" argument right, I think, but is much too sanguine about the health of the middle class. Sure, more kids are going to college, but that's never going to be more than a minority of the population. And while resentment toward the rich may indeed be muted in America, will it stay that way if current trends continue? I have my doubts. Posted by Kevin Drum at May 31, 2003 12:15 PM | TrackBackComments
"This trend is likely to continue" I am not convinced about this ... the economy (and particularly the non-manufacturing sectors) need to grow at a certain rate in order to absorb the college graduates. Further, these jobs are also at risk of being exported overseas. "since not everyone can go to college" True, not everyone can go to a four-year college, but plenty of people go to a community college to get an associate degree, or go to a vocational school for post-secondary training. Posted by: Gautam Vallabha at May 31, 2003 12:34 PM | PERMALINKI don't so much know that the argument that college grads will always be in the minority is correct. 63% of high schoolers last year went straight to college, a number that continues to increase every year. We now have a population of 80% high school graduates - what reason is there that 80% of people or more couldn't go to a Devry-style school or a university? Posted by: cure at May 31, 2003 12:36 PM | PERMALINKThough college grads earn more than those with lesser education, and have for a while, a fact that you don't mention is that even those who hold four-year degrees have seen their incomes fall relative the very highest echelons (i.e. CEO's). In other words, inequality is increasing not only between those with degrees and those without, but *within* the group of degree holders. So, possession of a four-year degree is no longer reliable insurance against economic decline. Posted by: Chloe at May 31, 2003 01:04 PM | PERMALINKIs someone else making more than you evidence of an economic decline on your part? Don't absolute terms (as opposed to relative) have to come into play somewhere? Posted by: Brian at May 31, 2003 01:35 PM | PERMALINKOf course college graduation doesn't inevitably lead to a "good" job.
At this point in our history, college graduates have saturated the
parts of the labor force where post-secondary education might be
helpful --jobs that in the past were done more often than not (and just
as competently) by the likes of Carl Bernstein (who, like most people in
pre-1960s journalism, had no education past high school.) In the
future, if a larger percentage of kids graduate from college, it will
mostly mean that a higher percentage of truck drivers and Walmart
associates will have college degrees. oops . . . isn't so much the number of college graduates as the number of people who start college but don't finish. And some sociologists see those people as an especially resentful group. Posted by: penalcolony at May 31, 2003 01:44 PM | PERMALINKIt's the 4-year degrees that are mostly at issue here. These are the folks who make higher incomes, not the vocational school grads. Right now about 35% of 18-24 year olds go to college (I'm not sure how many finish). It's really not likely that this number can rise an awful lot more. Posted by: Kevin Drum at May 31, 2003 02:08 PM | PERMALINKMore than 30% of today's 30-to-34-year-olds are college graduates. A majority of today's kids enrolls in college; might be approaching 60%. Posted by: penalcolony at May 31, 2003 02:35 PM | PERMALINKSo what would improve the position of unskilled workers? There doesn't seem to be a lot: - technological change favoring unskilled work None seem particularly likely to happen. Posted by: tc at May 31, 2003 03:30 PM | PERMALINKPenalcolony: I dunno. According to the Dept. of Commerce it's 35%, not 60%: http://nces.ed.gov//pubs2002/digest2001/tables/dt187.asp Posted by: Kevin Drum at May 31, 2003 03:47 PM | PERMALINKThat's enrollment. Many 21-to-24-year-olds have already graduated and are no longer enrolled. And many from age 19 on have left college without graduating. Posted by: penalcolony at May 31, 2003 04:02 PM | PERMALINKSorry, I should have said: that's enrollment at a given time -- a snapshot. Otherwise, if you put your Commerce table next to my Census table, you get the statistical illusion of a 90% graduation rate, and that's quite an illusion. Many schools graduate far less than half of those who start. Posted by: penalcolony at May 31, 2003 04:11 PM | PERMALINKLet's not ignore the deeper issue Kevin's touching on here. There is no such thing as a natural economic structure; it all results from the system of laws and practices that make up a political economy, and that system results from decisions people make. The incentives in a viable, decent political economy ought to make it possible for people to live within the law, do what's expected of them, and live decently. This is where the decline of manufacturing, with its huge value-added component, has been such a harmful thing. Manufacturing largely underwrote this country's social transformation during and after World War II. Of course a system of political economy is limited in what it can do-- it can't create resources by fiat, for example, and this is where the communist systems fell down. But that's a far cry from saying that it can't design or influence who gets how much in a society; in fact we do it all the time and we're doing it right now. The market is not nature. It is an abstraction of human behavior which shapes and is shaped by government policies and social practices. Even George Will said so at the height of the Enron scandals. Posted by: Altoid at May 31, 2003 04:21 PM | PERMALINKThere's a third reaction: I'm suspicious about this "lack of resentment" thing. I'm not sure how it's measured. When David Brooks says that middle class folks "aren't surrounded by things they can't afford," he blithely ignores the most significant social development of the century, namely, television. Many families see a lot more television than they do other people in their community, and television is chock-a-block with things they can't afford--not to mention the illusion that they would be much happier if they did own these things. I think at least some of this lack of resentment (if there is such a thing) is attributable to the persistent belief people have that they, too, could one day be rich. You don't want to be hassling the winners--you want to be joining them. Posted by: Realish at May 31, 2003 08:04 PM | PERMALINKI don't know what to think about income mobility in the U.S. The
Urban Institute Report that Drezner cites makes it sound good, but check
out Alan Kreuger's NYTimes article from Nov. 14 -- available on-line at
Krueger's web site at Sometimes "average" is used to mean median, but most commonly it means mean. I suspect that the article is referring to means, and I would be interested to see the corresponding comparison of medians. Krugman's widely reported "Bill Gates walks into a bar" example reminds us of the shape of income distributions, and under such a shape I would not even be surprised to see the change in medians have been negative between '79 and today. Does anyone have pointers to the raw numbers? Posted by: Carl Manaster at May 31, 2003 10:23 PM | PERMALINKActually, when I said Drezner had the mobility thing right, I was referring to the fact that (a) mobility hasn't changed over time and (b) it's no better here than any other country. Social mobility is great, but it's a red herring unless we're somehow getting better at it to make up for the increasing income inequality. I agree that intergenerational mobility is the more important statistic anyway. It's not nearly as high as individual mobility, although I've never been able to find really reliable figures about it. Posted by: Kevin Drum at May 31, 2003 10:49 PM | PERMALINKCheck out Paul Krugman's article at: It turns out that this study is a bit flawed. Money quotes: (with a money quote inside, for extra money quotableness): "This means, Armey asserts, that someone in the lowest quintile would be more likely to move to the highest than stay in place. Put kindly, it's a silly argument. For subjects of the study who moved from the bottom to the top, the typical age in 1979 was only 22. "This isn't your classic income mobility," Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago remarked at the time. "This is the guy who works in the college bookstore and has a real job by the time he is in his early thirties.""
Barry. Maybe considering a college kid with a part-time job at all
is a bad idea. Clearly, his improvement in income in a couple of years
skews the figures. The funny thing is that for many the college degree is just a piece of paper. Many grads come out without much knowledge of anything. The degree represents a certain degree of stick-to-it-ness and willingness to follow direction, but these people can't read or write or calculate much better than they did when they graduated HS. And the skills they *have* learned aren't necessary for the jobs they get. The main barrier to jumping straight to work is the degree; they aren't substantially better prepared after 4-6 years of 'study'. The biggest social benefit of the vast expansion of the college population is that it soaks up workers and lowers unenployment. Posted by: Jim Lund at June 1, 2003 03:25 PM | PERMALINK"From the ages of 18 to 65, the average male college grad earns $2.5 million over his lifetime, 90% more than his high school counterpart. That's up from 40% more in 1979, the peak year for U.S. manufacturing. This goes to the heart of whether you think increasing income inequality is a problem." This isn't a mysteriously evil cabal of capitalists trying to screw those who don't go to college. Manufacturing jobs are a) not as important to the economy, and b) easily done by fewer people due to mechanization. To call this an in come inequality problem is to totally mischaracterize the issue. It is not a 'problem' that we can manufacture items for much cheaper than we could in the 1970s. It is great that we can manufacture things for cheaper, so that poor people can afford VCRs and automobiles! To imply that there is an 'unfair' distribution of wealth by this statistic is to imply that progress and efficiency in manufacturing techniques is bad. Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw at June 1, 2003 04:51 PM | PERMALINKRichiard, a summary of my post would be: 'that study is BS, and two good economists dissed it'. I understand that that's pretty much irrelevant to what you said, so back to whatever you were saying. Posted by: Barry at June 2, 2003 05:22 AM | PERMALINKBarry, I didn't see that the dissing included the issue of counting part-timers in college. Did they count Bill Gates among the high-school grads, or the college grads? He dropped out of Harvard and never graduated. I think Steve Jobs may not have finished college, either. Posted by: Jon H at June 2, 2003 06:28 AM | PERMALINKYes, Richard, as long as one defines 'internally' small enough, all studies are 'internally correct' However, the study was garbage, in terms of measuring income mobility for anything other than college students, and probably using bad measures of income. Therefore, it shouldn't be used to discuss income mobility in the US without very large caveats. Posted by: Barry at June 2, 2003 11:55 AM | PERMALINKA room without books is like a body without a soul. 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