Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Inequality - depends on birth or marriage

The United States is an unequal society. The top 20% get about half the nation’s income, compared to the 5% of all income shared among the bottom 20% of households. The top 10% of the population controls about 70% of the wealth.


In the U.S., about 50 percent of variation of wealth and about 35 percent to 43 percent of variation in income of children can be explained by the relative wealth and income of their parents, suggest economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. One reason for this tight relationship is that parents who were educated are far more likely to educate their own kids. According to Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Brookings Institution, the median wage of the average American male—employed or not—has declined by $13,000 since 1969. Most of that drop is because of plummeting earnings among those with a high school diploma or less, something that’s highly dependent on your parents. Evan Soltas examined the General Social Survey data and concluded that if your father didn’t graduate high school, you are eight times more likely not to graduate high school yourself—a 22.2 percent chance, as compared to a 2.9 percent chance among kids whose fathers did graduate.

The advantages of a privileged background don’t stop at graduation. Tufts economist Linda Loury suggests that half of all jobs in the U.S. are found through family, friends, or acquaintances. Canadian economists Miles Corak and Patrizio Piraino look at how often men end up working at the same company where their father worked, finding that as many as 40 percent have done that at some point. The proportion rises to 70 percent among the top 1 percent in income distribution. This helps to explain why the relationship between the earnings of parent and child is even higher at the top end than it is across the population at large, according to Corak. One-third of successions between chief executive officers in publicly listed companies in the U.S. involves an incoming CEO related by blood or marriage to the old CEO, the founder, or a large shareholder.

It’s particularly hard to explain recent changes in U.S. inequality by using ‘drive’ or ‘effort’ as your rationale. Had growth since 1979 been equally shared, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates, the bottom 80 percent of Americans would earn more today. The bottom quintile would have $1,300 more in income. Americans between the 60th and 80th percentile would earn $6,500 more. And the top 1 percent would see annual incomes lower by $347,000.

Is all of this because the bottom 80 percent of Americans have got considerably lazier since 1979?
From here

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