Why Decry the Wealth Gap?

Max Sawicky sawicky at epinet.org
Mon Jan 24 19:27:05 PST 2000


BK: Let me say right up front that I think income inequality is a bad thing, and I'd love nothing more than a transformation of society from a capitalist to a socialist one.

Still, I want to know more about inequality measures controlled for immigration (if such statistics are even kept). A Business Week article I read a while back claimed that individuals were actually better off in almost all cases, but the addition of workers on the low end of the income spectrum via immigration accounted for nearly the entire rise in inequality measures. I wondered about this aloud on the list and didn't get very satisfying replies. And now Cox and Alm are using the same argument.
>>>>>>>>>>

I've raised this point myself. If you imagine a set of people with given incomes that remain fixed over some time period, then add some additional folks with lower incomes, the average will decrease and the distribution will be less equal, even though the well-being of the initial group has not changed at all.

Ergo distribution results are sensitive to turnover in the population in question.

Even so, you could say less equality makes for greater 'social exclusion,' as they say in social-democratic Europe (and Canada, and Oz, for all I know), even though the 'excluded' are a new group.

In any case, State of Working America has tons of data on this question.

mbs



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