income inequality

When the French economist Thomas Piketty published his massive paper arguing that the steady rise in economic inequality was inevitable under capitalism, his thesis and its supposed and empirical basis quickly gained support among leftists, who echoed Piketty’s call for greater redistributive taxation. Other economists spent a lot of time …

June 16, 2014 by Phil Magnes In the past few days, Thomas Piketty and a few of his more unscrupulous defenders have begun to declare the data controversy surrounding Capital in the Twenty-First Century to be over, following the publication of Piketty’s response to Chris Giles of the Financial Times. I argue that the controversy is not …

Frank Hollenbeck The gap between rich and poor continues to widen. In 1975, the richest 1% of the population held 8% of the economic pie; now they own over 20%. This is a striking change from the 1950s and 1960s, when the richest owned just over 10%. Research by Emmanuel Saez has shown that between …