Posts Tagged ‘inequality’
“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.
“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”*…
Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin have a theory, one that led them some years ago to predict political upheaval in America in the 2020s. Here, their explanation of why it’s here and what we can do to temper it…
Almost three decades ago, one of us, Jack Goldstone, published a simple model to determine a country’s vulnerability to political crisis. The model was based on how population changes shifted state, elite and popular behavior. Goldstone argued that, according to this Demographic-Structural Theory, in the 21st century, America was likely to get a populist, America-first leader who would sow a whirlwind of conflict.
Then ten years ago, the other of us, Peter Turchin, applied Goldstone’s model to U.S. history, using current data. What emerged was alarming: The U.S. was heading toward the highest level of vulnerability to political crisis seen in this country in over a hundred years. Even before Trump was elected, Turchin published his prediction that the U.S. was headed for the “Turbulent Twenties,” forecasting a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe.
Given the Black Lives Matter protests and cascading clashes between competing armed factions in cities across the United States, from Portland, Oregon to Kenosha, Wisconsin, we are already well on our way there. But worse likely lies ahead.
Our model is based on the fact that across history, what creates the risk of political instability is the behavior of elites, who all too often react to long-term increases in population by committing three cardinal sins. First, faced with a surge of labor that dampens growth in wages and productivity, elitesseek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality. Second, facing greater competition for elite wealth and status, they tighten up the path to mobility to favor themselves and their progeny. For example, in an increasingly meritocratic society, elites could keep places at top universities limited and raise the entry requirements and costs in ways that favor the children of those who had already succeeded.
Third, anxious to hold on to their rising fortunes, they do all they can to resist taxation of their wealth and profits, even if that means starving the government of needed revenues, leading to decaying infrastructure, declining public services and fast-rising government debts.
Such selfish elites lead the way to revolutions. They create simmering conditions of greater inequality and declining effectiveness of, and respect for, government. But their actions alone are not sufficient. Urbanization and greater education are needed to create concentrations of aware and organized groups in the populace who can mobilize and act for change.
Top leadership matters. Leaders who aim to be inclusive and solve national problems can manage conflicts and defer a crisis. However, leaders who seek to benefit from and fan political divisions bring the final crisis closer. Typically, tensions build between elites who back a leader seeking to preserve their privileges and reforming elites who seek to rally popular support for major changes to bring a more open and inclusive social order. Each side works to paint the other as a fatal threat to society, creating such deep polarization that little of value can be accomplished, and problems grow worse until a crisis comes along that explodes the fragile social order.
These were the conditions that prevailed in the lead-up to the great upheavals in political history, from the French Revolution in the eighteenth century, to the revolutions of 1848 and the U.S. Civil War in the nineteenth century, the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century and the many “color revolutions” that opened the twenty-first century. So, it is eye-opening that the data show very similar conditions now building up in the United States…
They unpack their diagnosis, examine historical examples of successful– peaceful– resolution, and outline steps they recommend for a recovery from the hole we’ve dug for ourselves: “Welcome To The ‘Turbulent Twenties’,” from @noemamag.com.
For another “big cycle” take: “It All Has Happened Before for the Same Reasons” from Ray Dalio (@raydalioofficial.bsky.social).
On on the subject of what happens if efforts to stem a turn to autocracy that would (Goldstone and Turchin argue) lead ultimately to revolution and systemic failure, an optimistic (?) view from Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse argues that “Collapse has historically benefited the 99%.”
And for a suggestion that history does indeed rhyme, a headline from 1939: “Goebbels Ends Careers of Five ‘Aryan’ Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime” (gift article from The New York Times).
* Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
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As we batten down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977, in the 5th season premiere of the series Happy Days, that a water-skiing “Fonzie” (Henry Winkler) jumped the shark— which has become a descriptive phrase for a creative work– or entity– that has evolved past its prime, that has reached a stage in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with or an extreme exaggeration (a caricature) of its original theme or purpose.
An example relevent to the piece linked above (in this case, of new, discordant ideas masquerading as “old” and authentic): “How Originalism Killed the Constitution,” from Jill Lepore.
“A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him”*…
Nathan Yau is back with a(nother) arresting graphic analysis– this time, of the median salaries of different occupations in the U.S. (based on 2024– so, pre-purge— data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The median salary for full-time workers in the United States was $49,500; but salaries vary by occupation. The interactive infographic featured in the screengrab above shows– and allows you to explore– the spread…
Healthcare practitioners, such as surgeons and emergency medicine physicians, sit at the top. Airline pilot is the only occupation with a median salary above $220,000 that is not in the healthcare category. Then there are the CEOs and managers, followed by computer and math jobs. After that, most jobs sit below the $100,000-mark by median…
… The internet tends to skew our perception of how much people make. We see the things that people buy, but that is not always a good indicator for the wages people earn. These distributions are more bottom heavy than you might expect if you based your estimates on social media.
That said, all these jobs have a range of salaries, too. It’s not just variation within job categories, but variation for each job. The above charts, along with median salary, show 25th and 75th percentiles.
For example, construction supervisors make a median salary of $78,690, but 25% made $62,400 or less (25th percentile) and 75% made $100,200 or less (75th percentile).
There are also geographic differences, made more interesting by cost of living, but we’ll save that for another time…
Explore the comparative data: “Salary and Occupation” from @flowingdata.com.
It is, of course, important to remember (in a time like this, when so much attention is paid to the very rich) that this data excludes “unearned income,” the revenue that accrues to wealth (stocks, bonds, real estate, et al.) and the benefits of “contingent” stock/option bonuses. Along with inherited wealth, they explain most of the wealth gap (and economic angst) that plagues the U.S. today.
* Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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As we investigate inequity, we might recall that on this date in 1859, Norton I distributed letters to the newspapers of San Francisco proclaiming himself Emperor of North America…
At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of S. F., Cal., declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these U. S.; and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall, of this city, on the 1st day of Feb. next, then and there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity.
– NORTON I, Emperor of the United States.
“A free press can, of course, be good or bad; but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad”*…
Your correspondent is writing this post a few days early, on Friday, the 18th, the day after Congress passed the bill terminating federal funding for public broadcasters, now at the White House for signature. It’s a dark day, especially for those rural areas that stand to lose their only local media outlets and journalistic sources. But while this is, your correspondent believes, tragic, it is only a corner of the larger media “battlefield,” most of which isn’t non-commerical…
Rusty Foster on the frankly terrifying moves afoot on that broader terrain…
Yesterday Washington Post Opinion columnist Philip Bump announced he was parachuting out of the Post’s extremely hardcore new right-wing reinvention by taking a buyout. Bump was the last remaining reason to visit the Post’s Opinion section, where he was a thoughtful and methodical practitioner of what we would have called “data journalism” before the spectacular flameout of Nate Silver’s career and the entire existence of David Leonhardt made the term too embarrassing to use. His last column was titled “When institutions crumble, strongmen step in,” and looked at a range of polls quantifying the decades-long decline of Americans’ trust in our institutions, including the news media. Bump’s tenure at the Post ended with the words:
Trump has for years stoked the idea that actually, having your own facts is fine. And even as his base chooses facts that he finds inconvenient in the moment, he’s still pushing toward the next phase: Everyone is entitled to the facts that Trump presents.
What institutions of power will be left to disagree?
In his monologue Tuesday, CBS Late Show host and my former boss’s former boss Stephen Colbert called his (soon to be) former boss’s current boss Paramount Corporation’s $16 million settlement with Donald Trump “a big fat bribe.”
Last night, Colbert announced that CBS will cancel The Late Show entirely at the end of his current contract, in May 2026. Colbert is currently the number one show in late night, and according to Jed Rosenzweig in LateNighter, “CBS’s Late Show was the only show among the nine tracked by LateNighter to draw more total viewers in Q2 than it had in the first quarter of 2025.” CBS released a statement saying that “This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
It’s definitely not part of the Trump bribe. Do not put in the newspaper that this is part of the Trump bribe. We’re just canceling the number one show in its time slot because of… reasons. Backdrops! Headwinds! Serious TV business.
This is, of course, obvious bullshit. Parker Molloy pulled together all the red yarn better than I would’ve had the patience to, so just go read why it’s bullshit over at The Present Age. But the main thing to know is that this whole CBS/Paramount/Trump settlement happened in order to secure Trump administration approval for a media holding company called Skydance to “merge with” (i.e. purchase) Paramount. Skydance is run by David Ellison, a large adult Butthead and the number one boy of Oracle founder, Donald Trump pal, and the world’s second-richest person Larry Ellison, who gave his son $8 billion to buy Paramount and turn it into more of the same cynical garbage that every other media company has become.
Earlier this week I met someone new and he asked me what I do for a living, and I said “I’m a writer,” and he said “Oh, what do you write?” This conversation happens often enough, and in virtually the same words, that I recognized right away where we were headed. I told him about Tabs and at that point although my new friend didn’t know it yet, we were already on a greased slide toward the moment where I would say: “…but these days I only write it once or twice a week, because the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires.”
“I realize that sounds a little crazy!” I always add with an apologetic laugh, because while outwardly he’s nodding and making a polite “oh really!” face, I can tell that on the inside he’s expecting me to bring up MKULTRA and possibly the JFK assassination next. But it’s not crazy, and you don’t need to believe in any conspiracy theories to see what’s happened. For example:
In 2008, Sam Zell bought the Tribune Corp, loaded it with debt like it was a distressed office building, and installed a drunk1 radio DJ to run it. The Tribune Corp promptly went bankrupt and as part of its ensuing slow-motion collapse sold the LA Times to biotech tycoon Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018. By 2025, Soon-Shiong had purged the LA Times of any elements distressing to his distinctly South African sensibility, such as institutional commitment to newsroom diversity or informing the public about things he would prefer we didn’t know.
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a pittance in 2013, and for several years operated it as a reasonable and hands-off steward. But ten years later, Bezos would have a jacked new physique, a buxom new girlfriend, and soon he’d have a whole new set of buddies to impress. Claiming the Post was “on a pace to lose about $100 million in 2023,” (an amount of money it would take Jeff Bezos fully 28.5 hours of existing in the world to earn back) the newsroom job cuts began. By last summer, Bezos was bigfooting his own Opinion section’s Presidential endorsement and as of today, with craven former British tabloid bagman and drunk2 Will Lewis nominally in charge, almost everyone in the newsroom who could get out has gotten out and the paper continues hemorrhaging subscribers.
Peter Thiel paid just $10 million to kill Gawker outright, without even the pretense of capitalism justifying it, although he did eventually bid to purchase its remains as a bit. Elon Musk paid $44 billion to turn Twitter into a Matrix-style battery farm feeding a slurry of racist posts into his A.I. MechaHitler. Three days after Trump’s second inauguration, as one witty and perceptive media watcher reported at the time, “CNN head Mark Thompson offered Jim Acosta the option of moving his show from 10am to midnight and renaming it “The Jim Acosta Sucks Fake News Hour (Do Not Watch).” Facebook built a trillion dollar business in part by providing its users a centralized and individualized feed of interesting news stories, and then shut off the click tap as soon as Mark Zuckerburg felt he could afford to. Google built a $2 trillion business indexing news stories for search, as well as absorbing something like one third of online ad spend, with much of that also coming from news websites. But the moment that Google could use A.I. to ingest all that news content and serve it up muddled and lightly de-plagiarized right there on google dot com instead, news publishers immediately saw their search traffic crater too.
This list is by no means comprehensive, it’s just what I could immediately pull off the very top of the domepiece before I got tired of typing. Suffice it to say: many such cases.
When I told my new friend that the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires, he asked an extremely reasonable question, which was: “but why?” And what makes this feel like a conspiracy is that there is no single answer to “why?” Sometimes it’s arrogance, sometimes it’s ideology, sometimes it’s purely money. Often it’s a messy combination of all three.
But if you really want to step back a bit, the reason why is that we have a socioeconomic system that concentrates nation-state level wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals, with virtually no checks on what they can choose to do with it. So if Larry Ellison wants to turn CBS News into Bari Weiss’s Free Press TV, or Jeff Bezos wants to make The Washington Post into an ideological subsidiary of the Cato Institute… what institutions of power will be left to disagree?
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s simply what happened: “Billionaires Destroyed American News Media On Purpose,” from @rusty.todayintabs.com in his essential newsletter Today in Tabs.
Every last one of the links above is worth clicking– but perhaps especially Parker Malloy‘s piece.
(Image above: source)
* Albert Camus
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As we pray for the press, we might send investigative birthday greetings to Paul Reuter; he was born on this date in 1819. A pioneer of telegraphy and news reporting, he was a reporter, media owner, and the founder of the Reuters news agency (that provides stories both to new outlets and directly to the public).
In 2008, Reuters was acquired by the Thompson Corporation of Canda, resulting in the the Thomson Reuters Corporation. Reuters reporting has been hudged fair and fact-based by three independent assessors.
“The first wealth is health”*…
As Angela J. Wyse and Bruce D. Meyer explain, lack of health insurance explains five to twenty percent of the mortality disparity between high- and low-income Americans…
We examine the causal effect of health insurance on mortality using the universe of low-income adults, a dataset of 37 million individuals identified by linking the 2010 Census to administrative tax data. Our methodology leverages state-level variation in the timing and adoption of Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and earlier waivers and adheres to a preregistered analysis plan, a rarely used approach in observational studies in economics. We find that expansions increased Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points and reduced the mortality of the low-income adult population by 2.5 percent, suggesting a 21 percent reduction in the mortality hazard of new enrollees. Mortality reductions accrued not only to older age cohorts, but also to younger adults, who accounted for nearly half of life-years saved due to their longer remaining lifespans and large share of the low-income adult population. These expansions appear to be cost-effective, with direct budgetary costs of $5.4 million per life saved and $179,000 per life-year saved falling well below valuations commonly found in the literature. Our findings suggest that lack of health insurance explains about five to twenty percent of the mortality disparity between high- and low-income Americans. We contribute to a growing body of evidence that health insurance improves health and demonstrate that Medicaid’s life-saving effects extend across a broader swath of the low-income population than previously understood…
“Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults,” from @nber.org.
Congress, of course, just moved to cut Medicaid; as the wording in the “Big, Beautiful BIll” stands, 8-10 million Americans stand to have the their covergae terminated orr severely reduced.
But even as we agree that extending coverage– fixing the “demand side” problem– could save lives, we should note that we have some serious supply side problems to address: 80% of the country, insured or not, lacks adequate access to healthcare service; and there’s a large and growing shortage of healthcare professionals and workers (a problem aggravated by the Trump administration’s draconian crackdown on immigration). Technology offers some hope, but humans remain at the center of the issue.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As we contemplate care, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Susan Lindquist; he was born on this date in 1949. A molecular biologist, she was a pioneer in the study of protein folding. She showed that alternate structural shapes of protein molecules could result in substantially different effects and demonstrated instances in fields as diverse as human diseases, evolution, and synthetic biomaterials designed to interact with biological systems. Her work laid the foundation for the development of AI-driven systems like Alpha-Fold that accelerate the discovery and development of new drugs and therapies.
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