Economic
Economic Inequality
Articles/Essays/Op-Eds
The Liberal Agenda of the 1960s Has Reached a Fork in the Road, Thomas Edsall.
“People are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness... favor fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.” (Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom)... Democrats give top priority, at 51.2 percent, to ensuring that everyone’s basic needs are met. (Nicholas Dias)
Warren Buffett and the Myth of the ‘Good Billionaire’, Anand Giridharadas. "...Mr. Buffett is actually the most dangerous kind of billionaire we have. The worst billionaires are the Good Billionaires. The sort who make it seem like the problem is the distortion of the system when, in fact, the problem is the system..."
Thomas Piketty Goes Global, Idrees Kahloon — “Now that the celebrity economist’s boldest ideas have been adopted by mainstream politicians, he has an even more provocative vision for transcending capitalism and overcoming our ‘inequality regime.’” Concludes with some of Kahloon’s proposed reforms that “fall short of revolution.”
Why America’s Racial Wealth Gap Is Really a Homeownership Gap, Tanvi Misra (2015)
Silver Spoon Oligarchs: How America's 50 Largest Inherited-Wealth Dynasties Accelerate Inequality, Institute for Policy Studies.
“…some of these wealth holders — or their descendants — shift resources to consolidate their wealth, fend off competition, and create monopolies. As this report will show, they focus less on creating new wealth and more on preserving existing systems that extract ongoing rents from consumers and the real economy.
America’s dynastic families, both old and new, are deploying a range of wealth preservation strategies to further concentrate wealth and power — power that is deployed to influence democratic institutions, depress civic imagination, and rig the rules to further entrench inequality. This tax avoidance means less support for the infrastructure we all rely on to preserve our health, safety, and quality of life... dynastically wealthy families use their financial, political, and philanthropic clout to advance their dynasty-building agenda.”
A Q&A With George Packer, Jeffrey Goldberg.
“…Becoming more equal as Americans is a huge thing. What matters is that we start moving in the right direction—and I think in recent months we’ve begun. As for national service and universal civics (though not a national curriculum, which would probably self-destruct), they would take some explaining, some persuading. But I don’t think they’re impossible…” (read more)
The Plushbottoms of Teton County, Ian Frazier.
“Life in the richest and most unequal county in America…. By the time the nonrich interviewees do speak up … they say that the very rich have earned their wealth, that they bring jobs, that the poor are grateful to them and ought to be.”