http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-ut-professor-economic-inequality-self-reinforcing.html
Kelly, along with Peter Enns of Cornell University, conducted a study analyzing economic inequality and public opinion toward government intervention. The study has been published in the October edition of theAmerican Journal of Political Science and can be viewed by visiting this link.
What he found defies expectations.
"When inequality in America rises, both the rich and the poor become more conservative in their ideologies. It is counterintuitive, but rather than generating opinion shifts that would make redistributive policies more likely, increased economic inequality produces a conservative response in public sentiment," said Kelly
Comments?
That's atrocious. I know that it's a political journal, but does he really believe that political redistribution of wealth is the only factor influencing income inequality? There is no economic explanation as to why the income gap has widened and no economic explanation as to how income inequality could lessen? The only thing that could prevent the gap from widening is welfare?
For all of the liberal emphasis on empiricism and "facts", it's ironic that they refuse to see the correlation between expanding redistributive policies in the United States and growing income inequality, whereas prior to the Great Depression the relationship was the opposite (lesser redistribution of income, yet shrinking income inequality).
Paper/source Catalán?
I actually don't remember where I read this (I tried looking in DiLorenzo's How Capitalism Saved American [I believed this was one of the few sourced statistics] and Rothbard's AGD, but to no avail), but wages for employees rose 55% during the 1920s, while capitalist profit rose by a smaller margin (implying that the group income difference between workers and capitalists fell).
For evidence regarding modern wage rates, I am sure there is plenty of progressive studies that show falling group wages in the past thirty-fourty years. Also worth noting is that minimum wage has been worth progressively less over the past thirty years, despite nominal increases. Inflation has guaranteed that today's firms actually pay less in terms of minimum wage than they did in the late-1970s (we're talking about a fall from ~$11 to ~$8, in adjusted terms).
Even given an empirical approach, income is a pretty bad metric of "how society is doing" in my view.
This is a chart I made, based on this chart. Basically, I was interested to see how big a "money pile" each income bracket was sitting on. If you multiply the average income of a bracket by the percentage of people in that bracket, that gives you an idea of how much money is earned by all people in that bracket, taken together.
Interestingly, the biggest money pile is not in the hands of either the very poor (most numerous) or the very rich (highest income) but in the hands of the middle class... right around $65K to $70K. This makes sense. Look at the advertising on TV. If the money pile were in the hands of the poor, all the TV ads would be for things that poor people want and can afford. But most TV ads are for products and services that are outside the reach of the poor (how many people do you know that make less than $20K and can afford a trip to Disneyland?) Similarly, if the money pile were in the hands of the very rich, we would expect to see most advertisements to be for yachts, Rolexes and Armani suits.
I believe that the government effectively places its weight primarily on the shoulders of the middle class for exactly this reason. They're sitting on the money pile so it makes sense to target them. Rhetoric surrounding "tax the rich" is just that, rhetoric. In practice, the rich do just fine. It's the middle class - who can't afford a phalanx of tax advisors, estate counselors and lawyers - that bear the brunt of the government's weight.
Clayton -
Develop this into a paper :I
I've tried and tried but I still cant understand the leftist obsession with equality. How about looking at the overall increase in the standard of living of the population during the industrial revolution...
The obsession with equality comes from personal insecurity. People are afraid of losing dignity by making less money, being seen as less valuable, etc. They project that as a social problem to hide their individual problem. Even on this forum we have status jokes.