| This study is misleading, because it uses 'household' wealth, instead of individual wealth (...) Perhaps, but there is no hard data at the individual level because, as it happens, basically every comprehensive dataset on income or wealth relies on tax or census data, which are aggregated at the household level by design. So any empirical claim about individual-level data should be taken ex ante with a big grain of salt and evaluated carefully; especially in a heavily politicized field like economics where data is scarce and motivated reasoning reigns. Take, for instance, the graph you cite [1], which cites Kitov and Kitov (2013) [2] along with the US census bureau as a source. The problem is, what that paper provides is not an empirical dataset but a microfounded model for predicting individual income --with all the problematic epistemological/overfitting caveats that they come with. Presenting that graph as an empirical fact and not as a debatable modeling exercise is quite misleading. Besides, as others have pointed out, all the links you provide discuss income, not wealth (and no, their arguments/reasoning about income do not readily/trivially translate to wealth, as you commented below). If you are interested, check out the work of Cheryl Doss [3], who has conducted actual empirical work about the differences between household and individual equality in Ecuador, Ghana and India. (PD: Oh wow even their claims about changing family structure in that blog [4] is disturbingly model-dependent. Much is made about the percentage of single-person households following an S-shaped curve, inflecting at 1968. However, they fit a sigmoid to what is a patently linear trend in the total number of single-person households beginning in 1950, and extrapolate back to 1900 despite having only two data points for that period. This wouldn't pass even a cursory peer-review, sorry.) [1] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g3WZGpDibPM/Up3ZAPRtScI/AAAAAAAAJq... [2] http://www.ecineq.org/ecineq_bari13/FILESxBari13/CR2/p177.pd... [3] http://www.genderassetgap.org/sites/default/files/Doss%20-%2... [4] http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-widows-... |
