Sunday, January 26, 2014

Wilkinson on Inequality

Article Link

From the article:

The package of goods Ms Anderson and my colleague mentions—low-crime neighbourhoods, safe public parks, good roads and sidewalks, decent schools—has not evidently become more rare over the decades during which inequality has been on the rise. On the contrary, I would hazard that most, if not all, of these things were much worse for the poor 30 years ago in places such as New York City and Washington, DC, when income inequality was much lower there. If this mechanism were at work, one would expect economic mobility to decrease when inequality rises, the deteriorating conditions for the poor increasingly trapping them in poverty. However, according to an important new study, mobility has not changed in the last two decades. No doubt the situation varies from region to region (and Americans are still less economically mobile than people in Canada and much of Western Europe), but this does not seem to me a promising hypothesis about the problem of economic inequality. Indeed, it illustrates the danger of locating the problem of inequality in its putative effects. If inequality isn't problematic in itself, but is of concern primarily due to certain dire consequences thought to follow from it, then one had better be sure there is solid evidence that those consequences have come to pass before sounding the alarm about the dangers of rising inequality.

Source:  Will Wilkinson, "Why Poor Americans Aren't Up In Arms," The Economist, January 24, 2014

No comments:

Post a Comment