| Since this is Hacker News, and there are a lot of really smart, numbers-oriented people here, I just thought I'd provide a link to a dataset that looks at income distributions within the US from 1913 to 2008: http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~saez/ Under "Income and Wealth Inequality" on that page, click the link titled "(Longer updated version published in A.B. Atkinson and T. Piketty eds., Oxford University Press, 2007)". It is an excel file that contains a metric ton of tables, charts, and figures. If you have a few moments and want a deeper understanding of the issue, that excel file is the best place to go. (Edit: I just wanted to note one thing. My favorite graph from the excel file is figure 1B, where you can see that we are basically returning to where we were prior to World War II. It makes you wonder what was so different about the post-war period that resulted in this shift. Personally, I wonder if the sudden subsidization of education for returning veterans had anything to do with it, but I have no data on this right now, so...) As far as my own thoughts on the issue go, I agree with pg. For a boring, academic take on it, there is a wonderfully dry 1980s paper by Rosen outlining the superstar theory: http://www.ppge.ufrgs.br/giacomo/arquivos/ecop72/rosen-1981.... Basically, thanks to technology and globalization the rewards to individuals that have the highest levels of abilities have been magnified. Their "reach" has increased relative to those below them, and their rewards have increased in line with this. While interest in this seems to be popping up all over the place due to the current economic catastrophe in progress, the idea that communications infrastructure improvements lead to income inequality is an old one. Here is Alfred Marshall (founder of neoclassical economics) in 1890 (revision from 1920): http://www.econlib.org/library/Marshall/marP54.html#VI.XII.4... As for myself, I have no idea about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing (or whether anything could/should be done about the growing inequality). However, it is happening now, on a grand scale, so I think that it is important for everyone to have some context on the issue. |