If you follow the inequality debate, then you’ve no doubt heard that the OECD has just released a report claiming to show that economic inequality lowers economic growth. I’ll have more to say about the study itself soon. But the most striking thing is the response to the report: namely, that its conclusions have been trumpeted uncritically by the media and by everyone who already believes inequality is a problem.
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview Steve Simpson, director of legal studies at the Ayn Rand Institute, on inequality, democracy, and money in politics.
What would you make of this sort of argument? “We live in a dark world indeed when all of those people in Planet Fitness keep shedding pound after pound, while millions of other people are suffering from obesity.”
The other day I was on Kerry Lutz’s radio show discussing economic inequality and he asked me how to put the inequality alarmists on the defensive. Here was my quick take on that question.
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview Scott Winship, Manhattan Institute scholar, on inequality and economic growth.
Economist John Cochrane has a terrific op-ed on inequality in The Wall Street Journal in which he identifies money in politics as the chief target of the inequality warriors, as he calls the critics of income inequality. When you get past their bogus economic arguments, says Cochran, “most inequality warriors get down to the real problem they see: money in politics. They think money is corrupting politics, and they want to take away the money to purify the politics.”
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview John Cochrane, University of Chicago economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, on the campaign to limit economic inequality.
Wall Street executive Steven Rattner recently had a piece in the New York Times bemoaning rising inequality, and the fact that voters don’t seem to care about it. But we should care, argues Rattner: “Inflation-adjusted earnings of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell between 2010 and 2013,” Rattner writes, “with those near the bottom dropping the most. Meanwhile, incomes in the top decile rose [by 2 percent].”
