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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
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