October 22, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Mindles H. Dreck, before whose
Mindles H. Dreck, before whose intelligence and erudition I kneel in awed admiration, has posted this table from the Census showing the income-to-poverty ratios from the census. This tells you, for each quintile (fancy word for fifth of the population, divided by income), what their income was as a percentage of the poverty line.
What does it show?
The bottom quintile held steady, or slightly faltered, from 1967, ground zero for Paul Krugman's edenic economic paradise. The second-from-the-bottom increased slightly. The middle quintile increased markedly. The second-from-the-top increased even more markedly. And the top quintile increased very markedly.
What does this tell us?
Well, Krugman is right that inequality is increasing. But it seems to deny his assertion that it is increasing because the bottom 4 quintiles have basically stayed stat, with all the increase in GDP since 1970 accruing to the very rich. The very bottom has stayed flat, but then, we'd expect that; the very bottom consists either of very young workers with no skills, or people for whom the government's baseline has set a floor on their standard of living. If that baseline was supporting life in 1967, you wouldn't expect it to have increased much since.
Posted by Jane Galt at October 22, 2002 11:38 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links