InEquality

Will Wilkinson might have gotten short changed in the name department, but I doubt if that's why he became a Death Eater. Not quite literally, of course, but I do lump him with Sauron's servants and Morgoth's minions because he is a Cato Institute mouthpiece. The Cato Institute, in case anyone didn't know, is a Right Wing "think" tank funded by some righty billionaires and other evil doers (big tobacco, big oil, big Walmart, etc.) Like it's similarly funded brethren, The AEI, The Marshall Institute, and The Heritage Foundation, it pretends to be an intellectual enterprise but actually produces only propaganda - scholarly looking articles that are rarely published or subjected to peer review - a necessity when what you have to say is less than honest.

Wilkinson, it seems, has written a long article on income inequality in America that got mentioned on two of the sites in my blog list (Andrew Sullivan's and Tyler Cowen's). This article tries to challenge Paul Krugman's various articles complaining about rising income inequality in the US. There are twenty-eight pages of it - many words and few to the point, as a great moral philosopher once said on a different subject.

Recent discussions of economic inequality,
marked by a lack of clarity and care, have confused the public about the meaning and moral significance of rising income inequality. Income statistics paint a misleading picture of real standards of living and real economic inequality. Several strands of evidence about real standards of living suggest a very different picture of the trends in economic inequality. In any case, the dispersion of incomes at any given time has, at best, a tenuous connection to human welfare or social justice. The pattern of incomes is affected by both morally desirable and undesirable mechanisms. When injustice or wrongdoing increases income inequality, the problem is the original malign cause, not the resulting inequality. Many thinkers mistake national populations for “society” and thereby obscure the real story about the effects of trade and immigration on welfare, equality, and justice. There is little evidence that high levels of income inequality lead down a slippery slope to the destruction of democracy and rule by the rich. The unequal political voice of the poor can be addressed only through policies that actually work to fight poverty and improve education. Income inequality is a dangerous distraction from the real problems: poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and systemic injustice.

Thinking Clearly about Economic Inequality
by Will Wilkinson

As his preface suggests, he wants to dispute Krugman's claim of rising income inequality. His problem is that the facts are quite unmistakable. The proportion of the national income going to the top 0.1% and the top 0.01% has increased dramatically in the last 40 years.

He has prepared a multi-layer defense. First, he says, income may not be rising for the bottom 90%, but their consumption is! I guess it's supposed to be some kind of blessing that people with less than $100 k income bought million dollar houses (which are now being foreclosed, of course. People are making less, but they are borrowing more! The fact that he led with such a stupid argument doesn't promise much, and the rest of his arguments don't deliver.

Second, even though the rest of us have less money, the crap we buy at WalMart has gotten cheaper, but the crap the rich find from Hermes hasn't. The point, I guess, is that money differences don't represent real differences - a very odd argument for a free marketer to make, btw.

Third, there may be more inequality, but it doesn't matter, because the Ethiopians have less income inequality than us but we are still better off. There's a big hooray, alright.

Fourth, income inequality is OK even it is harmful it it was achieved "fairly" - whatever that means.

Fifth, if incomes are unequal that's because that's the way Americans like it.

Finally - at least as far as I'm concerned - he claims that:

There is little evidence that high levels of income inequality lead down a slippery slope to the destruction of democracy and
rule by the rich.

This is simply untrue. Even if you disregard the evidence of Greece, Rome, and Florence, there is plenty of domestic evidence of that rule already. He likes to disparage "redistribution" but look to whom the hundreds of billions of dollars of bailout money are being distributed to - the same rich guys who brought about the crash.

Like others in his camp, he likes to pretend that there is a huge leftist army arrayed against the Fox liars and people like him, but those he cites are just more billion dollar corporations - the NYT, National rePublican Radio, etc.

If we really had rule by the rich, he claims, Obama and the Democrats could never have taken power, and he cites all the money Obama was able to raise. This ignores the fact that the same wealthy interests are almost as deeply embedded in the Democratic Party as in the Republicans. It also ignores the fact that it took an enormous cascade of misrule by truly stupid Republicans to arouse enough anger to throw them out.

Go ahead and read it if you have an hour to waste. The true believers are sure to wield it like a bible.

It also includes some pretty stinko writing, e.g.,

.
You can have a distribution of anything you can put a number on. Take height. Andre is 68 inches tall, Beatrice is 70 inches, and Carlos is 80. Let’s say they are members of a club...

WTF? Ok, he's trying to explain what an income distribution is,but this sure looks like non-nutritive fiber to me. There is a lot of it.