Category Archives: Econ Hist

Is “Right to Work” About Freedom?

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It’s Rick Snyder’s incredible flip-flop here in Michigan on so-called “Right to Work” legislation and his claims that it’s about “freedom” that brings me back to blogging.  Lately I’ve been getting increased questions about what “Right to Work” really means.  So, let me try to cut through the Orwellian rhetoric and explain.

So called “Right to Work” laws have absolutely nothing to do with “freedom” for workers. The “freedom” talk is purely a made-up rhetorical lie intended to get gullible workers to support something that most likely is not in their personal best interest.  Supporters of  so-called “Right to Work” laws (RTW)  claim it’s about establishing the “freedom to not be forced to join a union”, that it’s about “freedom of association”.  But that is an absolute falsehood.  Forcing someone to join a union as a condition of employment is called a “closed shop” rules.  Ever since the 1948 Taft Hartley (a US law covering all states) “the closed shop” has been illegal. Let me repeat for clarity. Forcing someone to join a union as a conditon of employment has been illegal everywhere, including Michigan, since 1948.  RTW laws change nothing in this respect.

But Taft Hartley law also says that if a union is certified as bargaining representative, then the union must bargain on behalf of ALL employees, whether union members or not.  Further all employees are covered by the union-negotiated contract, whether members or not. A union becomes the certified bargaining representative by a vote of ALL employees at some point in time, with a majority necessary to cerify.  A union may be de-certified later by another majority vote of all employees (whether members or not).  Until the union is decertified, the non-member employees benefit from the contract and are covered by the contract.  If a union is certified to represent, non-members are not free to strike different deals or contracts.

Employees who choose to be union members pay dues.  In return for dues, members receive the benefits of bargaining, the contract, and due process representation. Members also get to vote on union leadership and maybe participate in social events put on by the union, depending on which union it is. Non-members do not get the social benefits or voting rights, but they DO get the benefit of the contract, bargaining, and due process.  In return, non-members do not pay “dues”. Rick Ungar in Forbes clarifies:

But did you know that Taft-Hartley further requires that the union be additionally obligated to provide non-members’ with virtually all the benefits of union membership even if that worker elects not to become a card-carrying union member?

By way of example, if a non-member employee is fired for a reason that the employee believes to constitute a wrongful termination, the union is obligated to represent the rights of that employee in the identical fashion as it would represent a union member improperly terminated. So rock solid is this obligation that should the non-union member employee be displeased with the quality of the fight the union has put forth on his or her behalf, that non-union member has the right to sue the union for failing to prosecute as good a defense as would be expected by a wrongfully terminated union member.

Obviously, the Taft Hartley law puts a burden on unions. A certified bargaining agent union must bargain on behalf of all workers, whether they are members or not.  That costs the union money and time.  Yet,the union may only collect “dues” from members.  Herein lies the difference between RTW states and the rest. The rest should properly be called “union shop” states.  In a “union shop” state such as Michigan was until yesterday (Dec 11, 20123), the certified union may charge “agency fees”, not “dues”, to non-member employees on whose behalf they bargain. Agency fees are required by law of non-member employees in union shop states. In RTW states, non-member employees do not have to pay agency fees. In RTW states, non-member employees are allowed to benefit from the contract and protections and bargaining power of the union without paying a dime to support the bargaining activities.  The agency fees are established in union shop states to reimburse the union for it’s costs of negotiating, bargaining, etc.  RTW laws are all about how much money gets paid to certified unions and have nothing to do with “freedom”.

How Much Are Dues vs. Agency Fees?  Enter the Supreme Court

For a few decades after passage of Taft Hartley in 1948, many unions set the agency fee at the same dollar amount per month as the dues.  Obviously this encourages membership since an employee faces a choice of same cost for non-membership vs membership, yet membership brings some marginal benefits beyond the bargaining and contract benefits.  But, a few decades ago (I forget exactly when – I think it was in the 1980′s), some non-members of unions in union shop states sued to not have to pay the agency fee, claiming a First Amendment free speech violation. The logic of their argument was essentially that:

  • union shop labor laws required non-members to pay agency fees to an organization, the union, of which they were not a member and with whom they may disagree politically
  • unions use some of their money for political “speech” purposes: campaign contributions, advertising, lobbying, etc.
  • Ergo, the laws were forcing the non-members to supoort political speech with which they disagreed and therefore should be considered unconstitutional under the US Constitution 1st Amendment.

Countering the non-member’s argument was the union position that the non-members benefit from the union’s activity (bargaining) and should be required to contribute their share to the costs.  If non-members were not required to monetarily support the union’s bargaining and other activities, then it would constitute an unfair burden on members (they would be forced to pay to provide union benefits to non-members) which is itself probably unconstitutional (see Beverly Mann about Article 1, Section 10)

The Supreme Court “split the baby” and developed a solution that acknowledged both sides.  The Supreme Court established that required agency fees are indeed constitutional (ie. “union shop” laws are constitutional).  But, it also said that requiring non-members to support political speech and activities with which they disagreed was not constitutional.  The solution lay in establishing that unions report the amounts they spend on political speech and adjust the agency fee to be some fraction of the dues.  In other words, if the dues for members were $40 per month and the union reported that 20% of it’s total expenses were for political speech activities, then the agency fee would have to be set at $32. This decision was one of a few public policy and economy changes that helped to reduce union influence in the political arena starting in the 1980′s.  There were other more significant ones such as the PATCO strike, but the Supreme Court decision did help reduce marginally some of the money and support unions could provide to union-friendly politicians.  The effect was most pronounced in private sector unions.

Indeed, the battle over RTW laws vs. union shops has nothing to do at all with “freedom for workers”.  It has everything to do with money for political campaigns and political activities.  Historically, most union political activities have been in support of Democratic candidates, but not always.  Republicans perceive they can gain a significant advantage and perhaps a permanent power majority if they can weaken unions and cut-off the political support unions provide to Democrats while simultaneously increasing their financial support from corporations and billionaires, neither of which face any limitations any more.  It is no accident that police unions are exempt from the new RTW law in Michigan.  Police unions such as the FOP can continue in Michigan to demand either dues or agency fees from all police officers.  Why?  Police unions have historically been the unions most likely to support Republican candidates, particularly for court judgeships.

NOTE: Despite continuing really heavy work duties, I am going to try to make posts in the next few days about “Whether and How RTW Laws Weaken Unions and Affect Workers” and “What the Evidence Shows on RTW Laws and Economic Growth”. 

David McWilliams Explains Why Austerity Is Doomed In Europe

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A very interesting video by an Irish economist explaining how the current reduce government spending (“austerity”) approach to the Eurozone debt and currency crisis is doomed to fail. It is doomed because cutting government spending in a recession only makes the recession worse, which in turn, reduces tax collections which then makes the government deficits worse not better.  But not only is the austerity approach all wrong to solving the debt crisis, it carries very significant risk of social upheaval.  (hat tip to Philip Pilkington and New Economic Perspectives).

Now I’ll offer one pre-emptive comment.  Critics of the arguments McWilliams makes often claim that either government spending isn’t really effective, that somehow only private investment spending will stimulate an economy.  Or, the critics claim that any resources the government puts into use through spending actually detract from the economy by denying those resources to some supposedly better, privately chosen use. Both of these criticism fail.  We are clearly discussing a situation in which there are excess, unused economic resources in the economy.  In plain language:  there’s high unemployment and people are out of work.  The criticisms are all based on an idea called “crowding out”.  For crowding out to occur, the economy must be at full employment – the opposite of being in a recession.

Student Debt + Stagnant Real Wages = Colleges Need to Focus On Student Success

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Today’s post is an excerpt of something I wrote for another site.  This year, in addition to my teaching duties at the college, I’m leading a project to update our college strategic plan.  As part of that project I’m writing and editing a series of “briefing papers” (long blog posts, actually) about issues of strategic importance to the college’s future.  When those papers cover a topic that I think might be of interest to econproph readers I’ll cross-post them. Last week I wrote the following about the student debt explosion in the U.S., the stagnation in hourly wages for those for with less than college degrees/credentials, and the implications for those of us who work in higher education.  The full original post is here.

America has a student debt problem.

And it’s growing. According to the statistics assembled by the New York Federal Reserve Bank, theU.S. Dept. of Education, and other sources, total student loan debt outstanding is nearing $1 trillion, easily exceeding the $791 billion in total credit card debt.  As disturbing as the total might seem, the growth rate of student debt is even more distressing.  This graph, first published by The Atlantic last summer from NY Federal Reserve Bank statistics shows the relative growth  (not amounts) of outstanding student debt since 1999 compared to total household debt including mortgages. FromThe Atlantic:

The red line shows the cumulative growth in student loans since 1999. The blue line shows the growth of all other household debt except for student loans over the same period.

crazy student loans 2011-q2.png

This chart looks like a mistake, but it’s correct. Student loan debt has grown by 511% over this period. In the first quarter of 1999, just $90 billion in student loans were outstanding. As of the second quarter of 2011, that balance had ballooned to $550 billion.

The chart  is striking for another reason. See that blue line for all other debt but student loans? This wasn’t just any average period in history for household debt. This period included the inflation of a housing bubble so gigantic that it caused the financial sector to collapse and led to the worst recession since the Great Depression. But that other debt growth? It’s dwarfed by student loan growth.

Roots of the Problem

The student loan debt problem has many roots, most of which [colleges] cannot change or directly affect.  Causes of the explosion in student debt include:

  • A long-term shift in U.S. political opinion away from thinking of higher education as a public good with direct funding support from government toward thinking that students should pay for their own educations with loans guaranteed by the government.
  • Tuition and fee increases in higher education (particularly at 4 year schools and especially at private schools) have outpaced inflation for at least 3 decades, driven by cost increases, stagnant productivity, and reduced government direct funding.
  • Middle class real incomes have been largely stagnant or only modestly increasing for those same 3 decades, limiting the ability of families to pay dependent students’ tuitions.
  • The collapse of the housing price and mortgage bubble in 2006-07 which limited the ability of many middle- and working-class families to finance college education through home equity loans.
  • High unemployment rates since 2008 have limited the ability of students to work while in college and have also sent increased numbers of unemployed back to college.

… most community colleges can be a partial solution to the nation’s growing student loan burden.  After all, [community colleges are] one of the most cost-effective providers of the first 2 years of a college education.  Indeed, students can graduate with a bachelors’ degree with less total indebtedness if they take their first two years at community college and then transfer.

But the growing student loan problem when combined with another trend has even more significant implications the community college mission.

The Long Term Trend on Real Incomes – A Closing Middle Class

Long term trends in incomes in the U.S. including increasing income inequality have become a news headline topic in recent months.  …  Cumulative Growth in Hourly Wages, 1979-2009, by Level of EducationAs this graph from  the Congressional Budget Office (via Paul Krugman) shows, over the past 30 years the clear trend in hourly wages for workers with less than high school or only high school education has been negative. A high school graduate now earns 10% less per hour in inflation-adjusted dollars than they did 30 years ago.  Even workers who only have some college but haven’t completed a formal degree or credential are either negative or at best, even with 30 years ago.  The data in the graph is from 2009 and labor market conditions have not improved since then.  Indeed, most labor market economists, myself included, expect little to no improvement in wages or employment rates for many years to come.

So what does this mean?  It’s clear that for young and middle-aged people, the route to a rising income and participation in the middle class requires either a college credential or advanced degree.  Yes, anecdotal exceptions are always possible such as the stellar young person who becomes a big success in sports or entertainment. But the numbers are clear – for virtually all, membership in the middle class in the future requires succeeding at college not just attempting college.

Implications for LCC and It’s Mission

The mission of LCC and community colleges in general since they were created has been to provide access.  The great post-World War II expansion of community colleges in the U.S., of which LCC was a part, was based on the idea that broad, democratic access to higher education was important.  Community colleges provided access to college for millions who otherwise couldn’t attend, either because of costs, lack of family support, family/work obligations, location, lack of preparation, grades, or other circumstances.  Over time community colleges have expanded programs to help  increase access to even more individuals.  Indeed, this open-door, democratic access mission is a large part of the motivation for many who work at LCC.  Providing access is something we could feel good about.

But let’s consider how access has traditionally worked.  LCC, like most community colleges, has focused on providing the same basic instruction and learning that was available at 4 year institutions.  The difference was we had an open-door. We provided access.  We provided a chance at college and greater income and success in life. But it was always considered up to the student to succeed. The historical model is the college provides the student a chance at success. If they didn’t succeed that was their problem.  We measured our success by our enrolments as an indicator of the number of people to whom we had provided access.  Thirty years ago, if a student attempted college and didn’t succeed it didn’t carry the consequences it does today.  Thirty and forty years ago, a student who failed at college or simply didn’t complete could always get a job in a factory or a trade. They could still make a middle-class life despite not succeeding at college.

Now the trends tell a different outcome.  If a student doesn’t attempt college at all, they are likely not going to stay in the middle class at all and will likely experience declining real incomes.  The big change is if the student does attempt college but simply doesn’t succeed or complete, today their prospects for staying in the middle class are slim.  Successful completion of a college degree or credential has become a requirement now for a middle class future. It’s necessary for young people in particular to attempt and succeed at college now.

But now let’s add the student loan issue.  Suppose a person attempts college today but doesn’t succeed. Not only are they faced with the prospect of flat to declining real income, they have a significant burden – their student debt. Under current law there are really only two ways to discharge student debt – either pay it or die. Student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. There’s no asset to sell or foreclose. So today’s student is facing a higher risk environment than their predecessors did in previous generations.  Instead of access to college being a chance at a better life, it’s now a high-risk necessity.  So it’s not just access; it’s success that matters.

…The governments, both state and federal, are paying increasing attention to success rates.  As mentioned in the first briefing paper, state governments, including Michigan, are increasingly looking at funding for higher education in terms of how many successful credentials or degrees does it produce, not just how many seats in classes were offered.

Beyond what the government is requiring, the success issues pose a challenge to our understanding of our core mission and how we measure our institutional success. In today’s environment, providing access to large numbers of students without regard for their success is playing a cruel joke on them.  It’s teasing them with dreams of a future many of them won’t achieve and then punishing them with a burden of debt.  For those of us in the institution, that’s not the motivator that the original access mission was. We need to adjust our sense of the mission.  Yes, access is important, but it needs to be successful access.  Successful access as a mission changes many things.

It changes our most basic metric of institutional success. Instead of simply enrollment growth showing institutional success at providing access, we now need to consider whether that access was successful. …But measuring success and access are one thing. Improving them is another. The shift to successful access calls for many changes in the organization, it’s processes, systems, the curriculum, teaching methods, support services, and attitudes. It is not easy or simple. It is very challenging.


Occupy Wall Street Meets Fahrenheit 451 – Whose Property Rights?

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I’m not the most regular blogger.  I really do strive to post daily, it often doesn’t work out. Sometimes my schedule pinched.  Other times, health issues get in the way (ever try to write with a toothache?).  But then there are times when the news makes me so angry I can’t find civil words that might illuminate instead of inflame.  This past week my tooth hurt, but it was really the latter.

As most know by now, the New York City Police organized and conducted a raid to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters last week.  They did it under cover of night using paramilitary tactics.  There was excessive and unnecessary violence.  I won’t go into that here. You can try one of the literally thousands of YouTube videos about the police brutality.  It was an apparent coordinated national effort since 18 other cities conducted similar raids with similar tactics on the same day.

Yale University lecturer John Stoehr has written how the order for the police to clear the Occupy Wall Street crowd from Zucotti Park came from Brookfield Properties, a private company, despite a court order allowing the protesters. For Mayor Bloomberg private property rights trump any kind of public rights, even when the public’s right is backed by a court.  Stoehr also observes how Brookfield Properties is also subsidized by the public coffers to the tune of $174.5 million.  Apparently those private property rights include the right to the public’s money.  It’s no wonder that JP Morgan Chase has felt the need to bribe donate to the Police Department.

The mayor and his police force’s concern with property rights doesn’t extend to everybody.  Only the rich, the 1%, are entitled to property rights protection.  Ordinary citizens are not.  Consider the police department’s treatment of the property of a private library.  Many have told the story of the police’s destruction of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s public library, but I’ll let the American Library Association tell it here:

The People’s Library, a library constructed by the New York Occupy Wall Street movement, was seized in the early morning hours of Nov. 15, by the New York Police Department during a planned raid to evict Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park. The library held a collection of more than 5,000 items and provided free access to books, magazines, newspapers and other materials.  According to ALA members who visited the site, the library reflected many of ALA’s core intellectual freedom values and best practices—a balanced, cataloged collection, representing diverse points of view, that included children’s books and reference service often provided by professional librarians.

City officials assured library staff that library materials would be safely transported to a sanitation depot, but the majority of the collection is still missing and returned items were damaged, including laptops and other equipment.  The likelihood of recovering all library materials is bleak, as witnesses reported that library materials were thrown into dumpsters by police and city sanitation workers.

Longstanding ALA policy states:

“The American Library Association deplores the destruction of libraries, library collections and property, and the disruption of the educational purpose by that act, whether it be done by individuals or groups of individuals and whether it be in the name of honest dissent, the desire to control or limit thought or ideas, or for any other purpose.”

American Library Association (ALA) President Molly Raphael released the following statement regarding the destruction of the People’s Library:

“The dissolution of a library is unacceptable. Libraries serve as the cornerstone of our democracy and must be safeguarded. An informed public constitutes the very foundation of a democracy, and libraries ensure that everyone has free access to information.

“The very existence of the People’s Library demonstrates that libraries are an organic part of all communities. Libraries serve the needs of community members and preserve the record of community history.  In the case of the People’s Library, this included irreplaceable records and material related to the occupation movement and the temporary community that it represented.

“We support the librarians and volunteers of the Library Working Group as they re-establish the People’s Library.”

The American Library Association is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 60,000 members. Its mission is to promote the highest quality library and information services and public access to information.

The police and Mayor Bloomberg had no right to destroy these books, magazines, and computers. They had no court orders to do it.  They simply did it because they could. Because they can’t tolerate people learning and thinking for themselves.  In doing so, Mayor Bloomberg and the entire police force have revealed that none of this is about property rights as conservatives and libertarians like to claim. It’s not about the “rule of law” – they ignored the courts. It’s not about protecting some “liberty” or “Western cultural tradition”.  It makes no difference whether the police seize steal private books and destroy them in hiding, or they burn them in public. There’s a long history of  governments and police forces that destroy books. None of it is democratic or supportive of freedom.  It’s about enforcing special privilege for an elite and for destroying democracy.  It is in service to oligarchy, not democracy or liberty.

The Top 0.1% Vs. Rest of Us Throughout the 20th Century

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Following up on yesterday’s post about the Global Top Incomes Database, I thought I’d give an example.  Here’s what I created:

So what are we looking at?  The blue line shows almost a century of the average income of the bottom 90% of American earners (in constant, real 2008 dollars – scale on right side).  This represents the typical American worker and the fate of the working/middle classes.  Basically it shows nine different trends or periods.

  • From 1917 until 1929, there was no improvement at all (actually a dip in the 1920-21 depression).  Despite all the talk about “roaring twenties”, it wasn’t for the average American worker.
  • 1929-1933, incomes really drop precipitously as the nation falls into the Great Depression.
  • 1933-1937, incomes begin to recover based on the government spending programs of the New Deal and correction of the banking/financial crises of 1932-33.  But the progress stumbles in 1938 as Roosevelt and Congress switch course and try to balance the budget before we’re back to full employment (are you listening Obama?).
  • 1938-1943 incomes really grow dramatically as the nation regains full employment and unions gain power.  The driver of the recovery is the near unlimited willingness to spend to arm for World War II and the demand for food and other items by warring allies.
  • 1944-1949, incomes stagnate again, partly as a result of demobilization of the war effort.
  • 1949-1973 brings the Golden Age. Real economic growth in the U.S. is the strongest it’s ever been and thanks to Keynesian government policies, a productivity-sharing social contract between managements and unions, and strong world demand, the workers get their share of it.  This is the period of fastest U.S. growth.
  • 1973-1993 brings twenty years of declining real incomes for most workers.  Part of it is driven by slower growth brought on by two oil price supply shocks.  Part is inflation (although only until the mid-80′s). Part is driven by a major political shift towards conservative free market policies (“Reaganomics”).  And part is driven by a weakening of unions and union membership.  The economy, while it grows, doesn’t grow near as fast as it did in the Golden Age.
  • 1994-2000 shows a slight recovery in incomes during the Clinton administration.
  • 2001 starts another decline and it’s been pretty much downhill ever since.  Note that the graph ends in 2008 (last available data), but other more recent data indicates the time series has continued to decline significantly.

So what can we conclude from the typical worker incomes, the blue line of average incomes for the bottom 90%,?  Well, yes, as some conservatives and libertarians have been pointing out, today’s incomes are historically high – around $32,000 per worker.  And consumption by household is even higher.  But consumption has risen despite incomes stagnating recently. It’s because many, many more households now depend on two workers for incomes.  Yes today’s incomes are dramatically higher compared to 76 years ago – roughly 6 times higher. But all of the increase happened in the first 38 years after 1932.  Today’s incomes per worker are actually lower than they were in 1973 – 38 years ago.

Now let’s consider the red line.  This shows the percentage share of the national income earned received by the top 0.1%, the top one tenth of one percent.  These are the really, really rich.  There are really only three periods here.  The period before the Great Depression.  Observe that it really was a roaring twenties for the really rich.  In the decade of 1920-1929 their share of national income rose from around 3.5% to over 6.5% – all while the average American worker stagnated. The game was rigged.  As the U.S. economy grew in total GDP terms in the 20′s and as productivity soared, the benefits of that improved productivity went to the rich, not to workers.  The rich lost ground in the Great Depression because the stock market crashed and the banking system imploded.

From 1936 until 1979, the share of income taken by the top 0.1% declines rather steadily and significantly.  Why?  A dominant factor is that income tax rates were rather progressive with high rates on the very high top end.  Now this simply means that the share declined – they took a slightly smaller slice of the pie each year.  But the pie was growing very, very fast, so in dollar terms their incomes were still rising too.  Do not take away the idea that the rich suffered income declines during this period.  On contrary, they did well in absolute terms.  They just didn’t do well at the expense of others.

But in 1979 the rich strike back.  Their share of income starts rising steadily until it reaches the same very high levels today that are reminiscent of the late 1920′s.  What happened?  Well the same forces that hurt the working/middle classes during the last 30+ years worked to the rich’s advantage.  But another important shift was changes in income tax policies.  Initially Carter, but then Reagan and Bush all cut tax rates for the top end.  Reagan did even more.  He eliminated several top end brackets.  This resulted in people in the top 0.1% (multi-millionaires) now paying the same rates as people making $250,000 per year.  That didn’t happen in the Golden Age.  Back then there were special brackets for the very, very rich top end.

So what can we conclude overall?  Well, for one thing, we should definitely bury any idea of “trickle-down” tax cuts helping average workers.  When the economy grew the fastest and typical workers did best was when tax rates on the rich were high.  When tax rates on the rich are lower, the economy grows more slowly and average worker incomes stagnate.  We might also conclude that the OccupyWallStreet movement (#OWS) has a point.  The system isn’t fair and it isn’t working for average workers.  This isn’t a call for socialism, it’s a call for the vibrant capitalism we had in the mid-20th century. That Golden Age of the middle of the 20th century is the only time when we really didn’t have “class warfare”.  We had a social contract that called for sharing the gains from improved productivity. But a little over 30 years ago the really rich declared war on the rest.  It’s class warfare and the middle class has been losing. 

Awesome Resource – The World Top Incomes Database

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Any student, researcher, or #OWS protestor interested in income distribution and income growth should definitely be aware of this resource:  The World’s Top Incomes Database.  (hat tip to Krugman, from whom I learned about it).  It’s a very powerful database combined with a very easy to use interface that allows you to extract exactly the data you want as a spreadsheet (see the Database tab) or to customize your own graphs.

You can pick from a growing list countries -over 25 already and more under development.  It’s particularly interesting because it’s not just the usual developed nation suspects.  There’s also data on developing countries and some less-developed nations.  Then you can pick your time series and variables.  It’s a tremendous variety:  share of national income by the top  x% (without or with capital gains).  In some case, data series are available on actual average real incomes by percentile groups.  What’s also nice is that they don’t just leave it at a split between the top 1% and the bottom 90%.  You can specify the top 1%, 5%, 10%, 0.1% or even the 0.01%.  Amazing.  You pick the time frame from early in the 20th century up to 2008.  Then you regenerate your graph or data table.  The best part is that by right clicking on the graph, you can download and save the graph.  Students: are you listening?  Understand the implications for research papers?  

Quickie – Some Graphs

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I’ll be talking tomorrow to a bunch of students about income distribution, student loans, and other things of interest to the #OWS crowd.  These are some graphs I’ve collected from other sources that I’ll use.  No time to write much analysis today. It’s mostly just the graphs.

From Paul Krugman:

The true age of spectacular growth in the United States and other advanced economies was the generation after World War II, with post-Reagan growth nowhere near comparable. So why do these people imagine otherwise?

And the answer, once you think about it, is obvious: growth for whom? There’s only one way in which the post-deregulation boom was exceptional, and that’s in terms of the growth in incomes at the top of the scale.

Here’s a comparison of the postwar boom with the deregulation alleged boom, using real average family income from the Census and real average income for the top 1 percent from Piketty and Saez:

If you’re looking at the average, the last generation is a poor shadow of the postwar boom. But if you’re talking about the 1 percent, wonderful things have happened.

From CBO via Krugman again:

Inequality Trends In One Picture

Just an addendum on the role of the top 1 percent versus the college-noncollege differential. Here, from the CBO report, are the changes, in percentage points, of the shares of income going to three groups. The top quintile excluding the top 1 percent – which is basically the abode of the well-educated who aren’t among the very lucky few – has only kept pace with the overall growth in incomes. Just about all of the redistribution has taken place from the bottom 80 to the top 1 (and we know that most of that has actually gone to the top 0.1).

It’s a tiny minority, not a broad class of well-educated Americans, who have been winning here.

Again from CBO via Krugman:

A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Lose

OK, I see that some people are doubling down on the claim that rising inequality is all about education — when what the CBO report drives home is that this is all wrong, the big increase has come from gains at the very top. I have to admit that I have a sneaking suspicion that this is in part driven by KDS (DS for derangement syndrome): some people will rush to take a position precisely because I have debunked it. But anyway, it’s really, really wrong.

Here’s the CBO result:

Notice that the 81-99 percentiles have seen only modest gains; it’s really the top 1 percent that drives the story.

For comparison, here’s some data on wages of men by education from EPI:

Again from CBO via Krugman:

Graduates Versus Oligarchs

Dean Baker raises an important point here: it’s really awfully late in the game to be saying that the important inequality issue is college graduates versus non-graduates. It’s not clear that this was ever true, and it certainly hasn’t been true for a while.

I wrote about this years ago, using Ben Bernanke’s maiden testimony as Fed chair as an entry point. As I said then, Bernanke — like many others — had made

a fundamental misreading of what’s happening to American society. What we’re seeing isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.

I think of Mr. Bernanke’s position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It’s the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don’t have these skills.

…

Why would someone as smart and well informed as Mr. Bernanke get the nature of growing inequality wrong? Because the fallacy he fell into tends to dominate polite discussion about income trends, not because it’s true, but because it’s comforting. The notion that it’s all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it’s just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system — and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service.

The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that’s the real story.

Let me illustrate this point with some CBO data. First, from the new report, here are the income shares of the top 1 percent and the rest of the top quintile:

There has been no rise in the share of the 81-99 group! It’s all about the top 1 percent.

Second, even within the top 1 percent the gains are going mainly to a small minority. An earlier CBO report, using slightly different methods, looked inside the top 1 percent up through 2005. Here’s some of that data:

The big gains have gone to the top 0.1 percent.

From Menzie Chinn:

CBO on Income Inequality, and Interpreting OWS

by Menzie Chinn

Tabulating Inequality Trends

The CBO released a report on income inequality earlier this week. This means that the “inequality deniers” are having a more difficult time arguing that widening spreads an wages, compensation, or overall income are merely statistical artifacts dreamt up by liberals (see e.g. here). What is of most interest is (i) real after-tax income of the top 1 percentile has risen about 275%, and (ii) the pre-transfers/pre-tax income share of the top 1% has increased most profoundly.

SummaryFigure1.png
Summary Figure 1, Growth in Real After-Tax Income from 1979 to 2007, from “Trends in Income Distribution,” CBO Director’s Blog, 25 October 2011. SummaryFigure2.png
Summary Figure 2, Shares of Market Income, 1979 and 2007, from “Trends in Income Distribution,” CBO Director’s Blog, 25 October 2011.The CBO Director’s Blog observes:

The rapid growth in average real household market income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income was a major factor contributing to the growing dispersion of income. Average real household market income for the highest income group tripled over the period, whereas such income increased by about 19 percent for a household at the midpoint of the income distribution. As a result, the share of total market income received by the top 1 percent of the population more than doubled between 1979 and 2007, growing from about 10 percent to more than 20 percent.

The foregoing is completely consistent with the views laid out in Lost Decades (by me and Jeffry Frieden), Add-Figure 6-1 highlighted in this post, as well as this post.

Interpreting the OWS Protests

Against this backdrop, powerful forces have been deployed against raising tax rates at all on the top one percentile (and instead want to raise taxes on the lower quintiles).[1] [2]. The OWS protests can be interpreted in ths context. From TPM:

…Harvard Government Professor Jeffry Frieden said…

“Every debt crisis leads to major political conflicts over who will pay the price of dealing with the debt burden,” Frieden wrote. “One way or another, the accumulated debts will have to be addressed — either by writing some of them off, or by paying them off. Will the burden be borne by taxpayers? Government employees? Financial institutions? … I think that, in the context of our financial difficulties, OWS may reflect the fact that many Americans feel that too much sacrifice has been demanded of working people and the middle class, and too little of the financial community and the wealthy.”

Diane Lim Rogers, Chief Economist at the fiscally hawkish Concord Coalition, made similar points about the more reckless economic policies of the past decade: Much of the distaste with both Washington and Wall Street comes back to fact that DC is simply unwilling to change course.

“The difference is that during the Clinton years the rising tide was lifting all boats,” Lim Rogers said in an interview with TPM. “Low-income households were still doing better. Even then, the rich did really well, despite their taxes being raised.”

But what’s different now is that income inequality isn’t a political tenet of the left: it’s truly hurting people. Lim Rogers said the poverty rate is actually of more concern than the rich doing better given the circumstances.

“The outrage is not that the rich are richer,” she said. “It’s that the poor have gotten poorer — the inequality has become bipolar.”

Interestingly, Lost Decades, which makes many of these points, has been cited approvingly in at least one OWS document.

This is of course in contrast to views such as that of Econbrowser reader Brian who commented:

I honestly fail to see why some on the left are so concerned about how much money those at the top of the income distribution earn. Why not focus instead on why poor people are poor? And please, blaming that on the rich is a non-starter. People make bad choices in life. They get pregnant before they finish school and have a career started. They use drugs. They get tattoos and body piercings all over themselves and then wonder why no one will hire them for an entry-level job. They do not take school seriously. They have parents who never should have bred in the first place. I really, honestly and truly feel for the poor people and hope they can lift themselves out of poverty. But throwing more money at the problem, and taking it from the “rich”, is not the solution.

This worldview is apparently not rare; see this quote:

I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations (Occupy Together) are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! …

I think the defenders of the interests of the top income percentile will continue to harp on these arguments: The unemployed are deservedly unemployed; the poor are deservedly poor. This will help distract the electorate from the issue of whom will bear the burden of adjustment to the aftermath of the financial crisis(including stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio), and the response to secular trends in income inequality.See more on tax policyhere.

 

 

Brief History of Macroeconomics and The Origins of Freshwater vs. Saltwater Economics

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I and others, particularly Paul Krugman, occasionally make reference to “freshwater” vs. “saltwater” economics.  Here’s a little background to explain the terms and, I hope, shed a little light on current disputes in macroeconomic theory.

First, let’s go back in time.  The stuff that economists study, namely the economy, economic behavior, and markets, really emerged as it’s own discipline in the 1700′s with Adam Smith.  It had always been a topic for philosophers to discuss. Even Aristotle writes about the topics.  But it didn’t really emerge from “moral philosophy” into it’s own field of study until Smith.  Originally Smith and the subsequent economists such as Ricardo focused on markets and what we now  call microeconomics with a nod towards questions of political economy (public policy and the whole economic system).  The industrial revolution was in full swing.  The economic system wasn’t really “capitalist” because nobody knew what that was yet.  It wasn’t until the mid-1800′s that the word capitalism becomes commonly used.   Note:  Adam Smith was not a capitalist.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded usage of “capitalist” comes in 1792 in France, well after Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations.  

Then in the years just after the Napoleonic wars, England suffered some very severe financial crises and depressions involving the collapse of canal-building businesses.  At the time, Smith’s famous treatise was now 40-55 years old.  The authors now called economists argued about it’s causes and the policies needed to right the economy and restore full-employment.  The center of the debate revolved around questions of “whether there could ever be such a thing as a general glut of commodities”.  In other words, was it possible that the now industrialized economy with it’s newly enlarged banking sector and wide circulation of paper money could be too efficient?  Would such an economy always produce willing buyers for all the goods that sellers wanted to supply?

Two views emerged. One of them, later called “Classical” becomes the dominant thinking in economic circles.  The Classical view denies that long-term high unemployment is even possible as long as the government balances it’s budget and follows a laissez-faire policy of not interfering in markets.  A very mechanistic view of the economy as being constructed of self-adjusting markets that always return to equilibrium evolves.  The Classical view supports a very liberal (old sense) and anti-regulation view of government policy.

Critics existed but they failed to dominate the debate.  Karl Marx in the mid-1800′s writes some scathing critiques of Classical economics focusing on how the mechanism of market equilibrium cannot and does not work as described in labor markets.  Yet despite the critique, the Classical economists continue to dominate policy making and academic circles.  The debate, however, becomes more polarized with the Classicals of the late 1800′s and early 1900′s pushing even more extreme anti-government, pro-market policy positions and models than their Classical predecessors advocated. Many of the critics of capitalism and Classical economics move to the opposite end of the spectrum and embrace socialist, communist, or fascist/syndical economics, in effect taking a position that market capitalism is so fatally flawed that it must be completely replaced by a system of planning by the government.

Despite the dominance of the Classicals, there were always some economists laboring, researching, and writing about the cycles of business and the workings of money and banks.  They just didn’t get much attention or have a comprehensive framework to distinquish themselves from either the Classicals or the planned economy types.

Then came Keynes and the Great Depression.  Classical economics denied The Great Depression could happen – much like University of Chicago economists in 2010 who claimed that today’s high unemployment is the result of workers suddenly choosing to voluntarily have leisure instead of a job.  Keynes writes a powerful book called The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.  Macroeconomics is born.

Keynesian macro focuses on a total systems approach to the economy instead of just assuming that whatever works in a micro perspective in each market will make the total system work.  Keynes attempts to avoid the fallacy of composition. Keynes’s analysis shows that an industrialized, capitalist market economy with a financial/banking sector is inherently unstable.  It tends to have cycles – business cycles.  It’s beyond the intent of this post to explain the reasons, but the bottom-line was that Keynes identified a role for active government and central bank policy to maintain full employment  and stable prices.  Keynes rapidly gained converts in economics and soon the field was split into microeconomics and macroeconomics.

The success of Keynesian economists and Keynesian policies in the 1940′s, 1950′s and 1960′s led to dominance of Keynesian viewpoints.  But there were two subversive trends underway that would eventually reverse the Keynesian dominance and return the Classical viewpoint to dominance.  One was an attempt to build a comprehensive mathematics framework for all economics built on the math of Newton’s physics.  This effort, called the neo-classical synthesis, originally focused on microeconomics.  But eventually it turned it’s attention to putting Keynes’s ideas into the same optimizing-behavior mathematics.  Unfortunately, Keynes himself was long dead by now and unable to clarify what he “meant”.  Some ideas are forced onto him that weren’t necessarily there in the original (such as insisting on static equilibrium).  The second trend was a small group of economists who never agreed.  They were in effect Classicals in exile.  Led by Milton Friedman at University of Chicago and Friedrich Hayek, they launched a two-prong attack.  Hayek’s attack led to what we call Austrian economics today and is often embraced by extreme libertarians.  I won’t get into that here, there’s not enough time.

Friedman’s initial attack focused on re-writing our understand of The Great Depression.  Friedman works to show that monetary policy by the central bank was at fault for the Depression, implying that a laissez-faire government fiscal policy would be best.  Friedman’s disciples at Chicago and elsewhere expanded the attack by insisting on “micro-foundations” in all macro-economic theories and models.  By micro-foundations, they mean that the only acceptable basis for a macroeconomic model is one that is based only on the micro ideas of perfectly rational individuals acting on perfect information with perfectly rational expectations about the future and the nature of the economy.  By the mid-1970′s the Friedman posse was clearly winning the academic wars, in part because their position lent itself easily to using neo-classical synthesis  mathematics and because it was consistent with “micro-foundations”.

Friedman originally took a modified Classical position.  Classicals denied that either fiscal or monetary policy could affect or correct the performance of the whole economy.  Friedman pushed the idea that fiscal policy wouldn’t work but that monetary policy would.  Eventually the next generation of Friedman students and disciples went further and returned to the Classical position that neither fiscal nor monetary policy would work.

As it turns out, these newly re-ascendant Classicals, now being called New Classicals, inspired by Friedman, often taught at universities located inland near some kind of “freshwater”.  The remaining supporters of Keynesian viewpoints, now under severe attack, taught at schools nearer the ocean.  Then in 1976 R.E. Hall pens a paper called Notes on the Current State of Empirical Macroeconomics and identifies this split and associates freshwater and saltwater with the split.

As I see it, the major distinguishing feature of macroeconomics is its concern with fluctuations in real output and unemployment. The two burning questions of macroeconomics are: Why does the economy undergo recessions and booms? What effect does conscious government policy have in offsetting these fluctuations? These questions define the issues considered here. I will further restrict my attention to structural approaches, and will avoid discussion of the reduced-form approach, including its recent sophisticated manifestation (7).

As a gross oversimplification, current thought can be divided into two schools. The fresh water view holds that fluctuations are largely attributable to supply shifts and that the government is essentially incapable of affecting the level of economic activity. The salt water view holds shifts in demand responsible for fluctuations and thinks government policies (at least monetary policy) is capable of affecting demand. Needless to say, individual contributors vary across a spectrum of salinity). The old division between monetarists and Keynesians is no longer relevant, as an important element of fresh-water doctrine is the proposition that monetary policy has no real effect. What used to be the standard monetarist view is now middle-of-the-road, and is widely represented, for example, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1To take a few examples, Sargent corresponds to distilled water, Lucas to Lake Michigan, Feldstein to the Charles River above the dam, Modigliani to the Charles below the dam, and Okun to the Salton Sea.



 

			

	
		
	


				
					


		

		
The Economy Has Caused Riots Before – In the Great Depression


				

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Washington’s Blog reminds us that things got ugly during the last prolonged depression in the United States.  This interesting historical footage from the Great Depression shows what happens when large numbers of people are unemployed for years at a time, get desperate, and perceive that the game is rigged to the benefit of Wall Street.



This depression isn’t as deep or severe as the Great Depression – the bank bailouts and the 2009 Obama stimulus spending/tax cut bill (ARRA) made sure of that.  But as this week’s GDP numbers show, we simply aren’t growing enough to fully recover.  For workers, the nightmare is real.  With the #OccupyWallStreet movement (#OWS) growing stronger, spreading, and continuing now for well over 6 weeks, perhaps the Wall Street banks are having nightmares of their own about such scenarios as what happened in the video.  Could that be why JP Morgan Chase bank is making such large payoffs donations to the New York City Police department?  Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism fills us in:


Is JP Morgan Getting a Good Return on $4.6 Million “Gift” to NYC Police? (Like Special Protection from OccupyWallStreet?)




No matter how you look at this development, it does not smell right. From JP Morgan’s website, hat tip Lisa Epstein:


JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.


New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.


“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”


…


But what, pray tell, is this about? The JPM money is going directly from the foundation to the NYPD proper, not to, say, cops injured in the course of duty or police widows and orphans…


And look at the magnitude of the JP Morgan “gift”. The Foundation has been in existence for 40 years. If you assume that the $100 million it has received over that time is likely to mean “not much over $100 million” this contribution could easily be 3-4% of the total the Foundation have ever received.


Now readers can point out that this gift is bupkis relative to the budget of the police department, which is close to $4 billion. But looking at it on a mathematical basis likely misses the incentives at work. Dimon is one of the most powerful and connected corporate leaders in Gotham City. If he thinks the police donation was worthwhile, he might encourage other bank and big company CEOs to make large donations.


And what sort of benefits might JPM get? It is unlikely that there would be anything as crass as an explicit quid pro quo. But it certainly is useful to be confident that the police are on your side, say if an executive or worse an entire desk is caught in a sex or drugs scandal. Recall that Charles Ferguson in Inside Job alleged that the use of hookers is pervasive on Wall Street (duh) and is invoiced to the banks.


Or the police might be extra protective of your interests. Today, [Oct 5] OccupyWallStreet decided to march across the Brooklyn Bridge (a proud New York tradition) to Chase Manhattan Plaza in Brooklyn. Reports in the media indicate that the police at first seemed to be encouraging the protestors not only to cross the bridge, but were walking in front of the crowd, seemingly escorting them across…


The wee problem is that the police are in the street, and part of the crowd is also on the street (others are on a pedestrian walkway that is above street level). That puts them in violation of NYC rules that against interfering with traffic. Note the protest were aware fo the rules; they were careful to stay on the sidewalk on the way to the bridge.


…some (many?) the protestors who used the walkway and got across the bridge were also corralled and not permitted to proceed to the Chase plaza. Greg Basta, deputy director of the New York Communities for Change, told me by phone, based on multiple reports from people who participated in the march, that as soon as protestors got to the Brooklyn side of the bridge, they were kettled. Greg was under the impression that there were construction barricades at the foot of the bridge which made it impossible for the marchers not to walk on the street. Because the focus has been on the what happened on the bridge, the coverage of what happened to the rest of crowd is sparse.


Some confirmation in passing comes from MsExPat at Corrente (apparently some of the very first off the bridge were permitted to proceed):


My friends and I made it to the Brooklyn side okay–we ended up with about 350 other marchers in Cadman Plaza, a lovely 19th century park. What I didn’t find out until later is that several hundred people behind me also got kettled and barred from going all the way to Brooklyn. So I was among the lucky marchers in the middle.


But notice even then that the procession to Chase Manhattan Plaza [correction, Cadman Plaza} was effectively barred. [Note JPM may have operations nearby, Bear Stearns had much of its back office there, and if the leases were cheap, JPM may have kept the space].


We simply don’t know whether the police would have behaved one iota differently in the absence of the JP Morgan donation. But it raises the troubling perspective that they might have. …


So far, the JP Morgan donation is an isolated example. But the high odds of continuing deep budget cuts at the state and local level open up the opportunity for corporate funding of preferred services, and with it, much greater private sector influence on the apparatus of government. This is a worrisome enough possibility to warrant a high degree of vigilance by all of us.





			

	
		
	


				
					


		

		
Some Other Interesting Perspectives on OccupyWallStreet


				

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I’ve already mentioned my initial thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street movement (#OWS).  Here’s some snippets from a couple of others with some interesting insights.  First, historian William Hogeland writes at his blog Hysteriography.  He notes how the #OWS movement is a deeply American movement.  It has roots in the American revolutionary period as much as any Tea Party. He also reminds us that the Revolution wasn’t simply Americans vs. the tyrannical English. It was just as much about pure economic equality and fairness.   It was also about elitist rich Americans vs. populist American farmers and workers oppressed by taxes, foreclosures, and debts.






… I write about the deep, founding roots of rowdy, American populist protest and insurrection, often visionary and even utopian, yet informed and practical too, specifically over money, credit, and the purpose and nature of public and private finance. …most people still don’t connect the American founding period with a rugged drive on the part of ordinary people for equal access to the tools of economic development and against the hegemony of the high-finance, inside-government elites who signed the Declaration and framed the Constitution and made us a nation.


Sometimes people even ascribe democratic ideas to the famous upscale American Revolutionaries, who to a man actually hated democracy and popular finance. Paine, the exception, was ultimately rebuked and scorned by all of the others. [UPDATE: Anyway, Paine wasn't one of them; I threw him in defensively because consensus-history types like to "include him in" on the basis of "Common Sense," while including his social/economic radicalism out.]


The difficulty in dealing with our founding battle for democratic economics arises in part because the movement was not against England but against the very American banking and trading elites who dominated the resistance to England. That complicates our founding myth, possibly unpleasantly. Also, it was a generally losing battle. With ratification of the Constitution, Hamiltonian finance triumphed, and people looking to Jefferson and Madison for finance and economic alternatives to Hamilton are barking up the wrong tree, since what those men knew, or even really cared, about finance could be written on a dime. (Anyway, in pushing for creating a  nation, Madison supported Hamiltonian finance down the line. Their differences came later.) When Occupy Wall Street protesters say “It’s We the People!”  they’re actually referring to a preamble, intending no hint of economic democracy, to a document that was framed specifically to push down democratic finance and concentrate American wealth for national purposes. Not very edifying, but there it is.


…Amid horrible depressions and foreclosure crises, from the 1750′s through the 1790′s, ordinary people closed debt courts, rescued debt prisoners, waylaid process servers, boycotted foreclosure actions, etc. (More on that here and here.) They were legally barred from voting and holding office, since they didn’t have enough property, so they used their power of intimidation to pressure their legislatures for debt relief and popular monetary policies. Their few leaders in legit politics included the visionary preacher Herman Husband, the weaver William Findley, and the farmer Robert Whitehill.


They had high hopes for American independence. In the 1770′s, their “out-of-doors” collaboration with the famous elites was critical to enabling the Declaration of Independence — even though none of their names appears there (well, Benjamin Rush’s does, but by then he’d become unradicalized). Their democratic, egalitarian hopes dashed, in the 1780′s, in western Massachusetts, they marched on the state’s armory in Springfield to reverse regressive finance policies that had again plunged ordinary people into debt peonage and foreclosure while bailing out rich creditors (elites called that populist action, reductively, Shays’s Rebellion). In the 1790′s, with the Constitution in force, and Hamilton’s economics the law of a powerful new nation (partly in direct reaction to the Shays action), populists took over the militia and debt-court system throughout western Pennsylvania and western counties of neighboring states, flew their own flag, and tried to secede from the United States and form an economically egalitarian country. Hamilton dubbed that action, again in a successful effort to reduce it, the Whiskey Rebellion, and he and President Washington responded, naturally enough, by occupying western Pennsylvania with federal troops.


It is my possibly vain hope that reading up on such historical matters might inspire efforts like Occupy Wall Street to greater cogency and a deeper, more solid foundation in longstanding (if embattled and problematic) American values than they now seem to possess. You don’t have to look as late as the 19th-century Populists and the 1930′s labor movement, for example, to find an American left deeply immersed in both economic issues and an ambitious vision of a better country. Those things were present at the creation.








Hogeland also recommends an “Occupy Wall Street” Reading List.


Next up is John Quiggin at Crooked Timber.  He first observes that much of the eventual outcome of the #OWS movement depends on the “19%” – the folks that are in the top quintile, the top 20%, but aren’t part of the top 1%.  As we know powerfully from a graph I posted a few days ago:


First, economix at the New York Times reported on the basic income distribution data recently:


The graph below shows how much income is earned by a household at any given percentile in the income distribution, based on these new numbers for 2011:


DESCRIPTIONTax Policy Center


Incomes grow much, much faster at the top end of the income distribution than in the middle or at the bottom end. That is, the disparity in income between one percentile and a consecutive percentile is bigger among the very rich.




The top quintile, the top 20% may be rich compared to the rest, but not very much.  It’s really the top 1% and the top 0.1% where the income scale is truly distorted and outrageous.  Quiggin makes the point that the 19% is politically influential and powerful.  Perhaps not as powerful as the 1%, but clearly politically influential.  To keep the redistribution of income to the top game going, the top 1% has to keep the 19% on their side.  Without them, there’s clearly no legitimacy.  [bold emphases mine]


The top quintile as a whole commands the great majority of US income, and virtually all financial wealth – few households outside this group own much beyond their homes and perhaps some money in a pension fund….


The 19 per cent also have a disproportionate political weight, since they are much more likely than Americans in general to register, vote and engage in political activity. So, it makes a big difference whether, as as implied by ‘We are the 99 per cent’ their interests are aligned with the mass of the population or with the top 1 per cent…


The top quintile as a whole has done very well over the past few decades, and (despite some silly claims to the contrary), high-income earners have mostly voted Republican, in line with their economic interests. Certainly there are plenty who don’t vote their interests, but that is also true of many people in the top 1 per cent, not to mention bona fide billionaires like Buffett and Soros. [but]… a closer look at income growth figures suggests that, while the 19 per cent have enjoyed rising incomes, they’ve only barely maintained their share of national income. The redistribution of the past three decades has gone from the bottom 80 per cent to the top 1 per cent.


That suggests the possibility of a policy response in which the main redistributive thrust would be to reverse this process.  This would almost certainly involve higher tax payments, but this would be offset by the restoration of public services, which are in economic terms a ‘superior good’, valued more as income rises. The top 1 per cent can buy their own services, and are largely unaffected by public sector cutbacks, but that’s not true of the 19 per cent.


Another important factor is the growth of economic insecurity. The myth of the US as a land of opportunity for upward mobility has been replaced by Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling (another good source on this is High Wire by Peter Gosselin). Even if people in the top 19 per cent are doing well, they are less secure than at any time since the 1930s, and their children face even more uncertain prospects.


Finally, there is the alliance of the 1 per cent with the forces of rightwing cultural tribalism. The 1 per cent can only rule by persuading lots of people to vote against their interests, and that requires a reactionary and anti-intellectual agenda on social, cultural and scientific issues. As a result, educated voters have increasingly turned against the Republican Party.


I don’t want to make too much of this last point. As Allan Grayson said during his memorable takedown of PJ O’Rourke recently, the 1 per cent own the Republican Party outright, but they also own much of the Democratic Party, and can rule satisfactorily through either. Also, having a college degree isn’t the same as being educated – Tea Party supporters are more likely than the average American to have a degree, and college-graduate Republicans are even more prone to various delusional beliefs on issues such as climate change.


Nevertheless, taking account of all the factors listed above, even the most comfortably affluent members of the professional class, looking at the alliance of plutocrats and theocrats arrayed to defend Wall Street could reasonably conclude that it was in their own interests to support the 99 per cent and not the 1 per cent.


We are therefore (surprisingly to me) suddenly back in a situation where a progressive movement can reasonably claim to act in the interests of a group that is:..

(a) the overwhelming majority of the population

(b) responsible for nearly all the productive activity (as against the 1 per cent’s incomes drawn from a parasitic financial sector)

(c) economically desperate or at risk of becoming so.


Can all of this be sustained? I don’t know, any more than anyone else. But #OWS has already achieved things that most people would have regarded as impossible a month ago, and for the moment at least, the momentum is still growing.


The #OWS movement appears to be spreading and  growing in a way the Tea Party never did.  It’s clearly, as Hogeland points out, deep in the tradition of American politics.  And as Quiggin points out, the 19%, the top quintile folks  have had income gains in recent years but they’ve also had a dramatic increase in economic insecurity, diminished prospects for their children, and a reduction in the public services they value such as top-notch public universities and infrastructure.  It’s interesting times, especially since no presidential candidate from either party appears to align with the interests of the #OWS movement.