From my colleague Phil Rothman:
It may take some effort to get through this article. But if you do go through it you will be richly rewarded and ahellofalot smarter when you are done. This is not nutty professor stuff....The upshot: When household income statistics are corrected for 1.) total household compensation (that is, including employer-provided health benefits since these are the fastest rising source of worker compensation) and not just measured by wages 2) changes in household composition since married couples are less and single households more than 30 years ago and 3) using better measures of inflation, the middle class did very well over the last 30 years and shared handsomely in our expanding economic pie. This is the type of economic scholarship that really makes a difference. This is also the type of thinking that can stop us from adopting policies that produce a zero-sum economy where the main goal is not to grow the economy and then share but rather just to confiscate what someone else makes and then give it away. This is what Europe does and is why they have such pathetic economies. We can have that too and real quick believing that the rich are the ones who grab all the gains. Believe that if you like. This article shows that is boulderdash!
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