(Roughly) Daily

I welcome the Deaton report into inequality. I especially like its emphasis (pdf) upon the causes of inequality:

To understand whether inequality is a problem, we need to understand the sources of inequality, views of what is fair and the implications of inequality as well as the levels of inequality. Are present levels of inequalities due to well-deserved rewards or to unfair bargaining power, regulatory failure or political capture?

I fear, however, that there might be something missing here – the impact that inequality has upon economic performance…

Chris Dillow, a columnist at the Investors Chronicle, enumerates and explains eight ways in which that impact accrues: “How Inequality Makes Us Poorer.”

Image above, from “The Rise of the Inequality Industry,” also eminently worthy of a read.

* “Everybody’s talkin’ about hard times
Like it just started yesterday
People eye know they’ve been strugglin’
At least it seems that way
Fat cats on Wall Street
They got a bailout
While somebody else got to wait
Seven hundred billion but my old neighborhood
Ain’t nothing changed but the date”

– Prince, Ol’ Skool Company album, 2009

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As we realize that more often than not the greater good is good for us too, we might send carefully-charted birthday greetings to François Quesnay; he was born on this date in 1694.  An Enlightenment social philosopher, he was a founding father of Physiocracy, a set of proto-economic theories that held that the wealth of nations was derived solely from the value of “land agriculture” or “land development” and that agricultural products should be highly priced. He published the “Tableau économique” (Economic Table) in 1758, which provided the foundations of the ideas of the Physiocrats.  It was among the first works attempting to describe the workings of the economy in an analytical way, and thus can be seen as one of the first important contributions to modern economic thought.

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