Posts Tagged ‘exploding whale’
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics”*…
The rich in the U.S. just keep getting richer. Over the five decades, incomes have risen materially faster at the very top than anywhere below, and similarly, wealth has accumulated much more quickly at the top than anywhere below. A report from the Stone Center On Socio-Economic Inequality (at CUNY) looks at the mutually-reinforcing relationship between these two dynamics…
Homoploutia describes the situation in which the same people (homo) are wealthy (ploutia) in the space of capital and labor income in some countries. It can be quantified by the share of capital income rich who are also labor income rich. In this paper, we combine several datasets covering different time periods to document the evolution of homoploutia in the United States from 1950 to 2020. We find that homoploutia was low after World War II, has increased by the early 1960s, and then decreased until the mid-1980s. Since 1985 it has been sharply increasing: In 1985, about 17% of adults in the top decile of capital income earners were also in the top decile of labor-income earners. In 2018 this indicator was about 30%. This makes the traditional division between capitalists and laborers less relevant today. It makes periods characterized by high interpersonal inequality, high capital-income ratio, and high capital share of income in the past fundamentally different from the current situation. High homoploutia has far-reaching implications for social mobility and equality of opportunity. We also study how homoploutia is related to total income inequality. We find that rising homoploutia accounts for about 20% of the increase in total income inequality in the United States since 1986…
Note that the report was written in the 2020 (and published in The Review of Income and Wealth in 2023). The dynamic has continued since; the polarizing impact has grown.
“Homoploutia: Top Labor and Capital Incomes in the United States, 1950–2020,” from @stone-lis.bsky.social. (Read the full report here.)
[image above: source]
* Plutarch
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As we evaluate equity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that The Oregon Highway Division attempted to destroy a rotting beached Sperm whale with explosives, leading to the now infamous “exploding whale” incident.
“We shall go wild with fireworks”*…
Every Fourth of July, half a million people trek out to San Diego’s parks and beaches to watch the Big Bay Boom, one of the West’s biggest fireworks displays. But in 2012, the show became an international punchline when a glitch caused 18 minutes of pyro to go off in a blinding, deafening 30 seconds. It would become one of the loudest, most epic fails in Internet history, tweeted and viewed around the world…
On this pandemic-attenuated Fourth, a blast from the past: “An Oral History of the Great San Diego Fireworks Fail of 2012.”
On vaguely-related note, this short video, reputedly the most watched news clip ever:
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As we light the fuse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…
Use it or lose it.
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