Why Decry the Wealth Gap?

Max Sawicky sawicky at epinet.org
Mon Jan 24 21:37:01 PST 2000


NN Wait a second- we aren't adding poeple "with lower incomes"; we are just adding people who are employed in the economy. If the economy is creating employment patterns such that jobs on the bottom make far less than those on the top, that is a structural change in inequality, whoever is filling the jobs.
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mbs: I didn't say what we are adding; only that comparing distributions for different populations requires attention to differences between the populations.

Since you brought it up, I don't doubt that some of the change in inequality for the worse is due to immigrants who are paid less and whose families have lower income, on average.


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Most immigrants add more to the economy than they receive in wages and benefits from society (pretty well documented by the Urban Institute at this point) so the higher income -- or even steady income -- of the previously poor or median workers is possibly due to those very immigrants, so you can't analyze the economy in this static way.
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mbs: Sheesh. I didn't even raise this. My position is I agree with first part, and if it isn't true I don't care. It does not follow that this must raise the wages of formerly poor or median workers.


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With exploitation of those immigrants partly fueling the economic growth funnelling to the top, this argument blaming inequality on the immigrants entering the demographic analysis just seems very wrong.
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mbs: My whole point was that the addition of lower incomes need not literally drag down the incomes of those already here, though it does reduce the average of the 'new' enlarged population. See the Tom-Dick-Harry story in my other post.


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For leftists, the problem of inquality is precisely the problem of exploitation and to in any way explain way inequality by the existence of a new additional exploited class is an odd statistical sleight of hand. -- Nathan Newman
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Explaining or understanding the derivation of a calculation is one thing, what I was driving at. Understanding its political-economic roots is quite another, which I did not touch on.

mbs



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