As Capital in the 21st century, a recent book by economist Thomas Piketty, remains sold out across bookstores around the world – income inequality has shown to be a major concern both among citizens and policymakers. However, little attention has been given to a mechanism closely related to income inequality, but perhaps even more tangible […]
How an increase in minimum wage backfires on the poor
Income inequality has increased in practically every industrialized nation in recent decades. The best measure of that change is the Gini index, named after the Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who designed it in 1912. The index values vary between zero, when everyone has exactly the same income, and 1, when one person has all of […]
Marry Someone Poorer than You, Reduce Income Inequality
Everybody is talking about inequality and everybody seems to have their own favorite culprit, from globalization, to deregulation, to skill-biased technical change, and political capture. Yet a recent paper by Greenwood, Guner, Kocharkov and Cezar Santos (Greenwood, Jeremy, et al. “Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality.” National Bureau of Economic Research, No. w19829, […]
Squaring the Circle: Growth, Employment and Inequality
I need to confess to the reader that I have problems, but not solutions. Specifically, there are three problems. First, the rate of growth is decreasing in several countries: certainly in Europe, but also in Japan (my generation can still recall the years of the Japanese “miracle”), in the U.S. (what today is considered growth […]
Chilean Elections and Social Inequality
Last month I went to Chile to vote in the national presidential election held on Nov 17. This was the second time that I voted in my country. The previous one was years ago, when Pinochet asked Chileans to vote “yes” or “no” as to whether they supported his brutal regime against the United Nations’ […]