INEQUALITY or more specifically - income inequality and related inequalities
 

 My web-site HUB page HERE
This webpage needs more work
.
This web-page is linked to from my main ECONOMICS web-page.

NEWS: The recent publication of Thomas Piketty's "landmark" book in English has raised the profile of income inequality:

"The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values." << I here quote from the summary description in Amazon's website of the book:
'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' by Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer Books Amazon web-page. Release date: 18mar14. I heard of this book from reading this interesting article by Prof. Simon Wren-Lewis 'Inequality, inheritance tax and the UK election battleground' in his Mainly Macro blog, 15apr14.
I disagree with much in the 4th paragraph (especially its 4th sentence) of 'Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarised in four paragraphs'  - The Economist Explains.
My Head Talks Piketty With Bill Moyers - NYTimes.com video of Paul Krugman & ... talking about Piketty's book.. <<< excellent listening to Krugman. Agrees we are heading towards oligarchy [and away from democracy] as huge wealth buys political power, buys politicians [certainly in the US!].
'Capital (and income) in the 21st century' 'The first step to cutting income inequality is to break the link between shareholder value and executive pay' says author Simon Caulkin in ResPublica (thinktank). I haven't read this but would like to.
        More affordable (but is he just jumping on the bandwagon to earn money &/or out across his own take?:
'An Executive Summary of Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century''  A. D. Thibeault,  Amazon link £4.20
Part of Norman Housley's review of this summary book: "The key point to emerge from Piketty, as far as I am concerned, is that he thoroughly demolishes the trickle down claim of the free marketeers - trickle down does not happen, instead capital accumulation cuts itself loose from economic growth and becomes self-perpetuating and socially exclusive to the nth degree. "

By co-incidence, the author's name reminds me of Kate Pickett - co-author of 'The Spirit Level' with first author Richard Wilkinson - which I've been intending to read for many years - as it covers income inequality v equality... I must summarize and link here. Both these authors are co-founders of The Equality Trust.
Latest resources   The Equality Trust
The Equality Trust - www.equalitytrust.org.uk - excellent, e.g.:
'The lie that food poverty is caused by bad choices' - The Equality Trust 12jun14.

A useful bit of data is from Oxfam, and its more recent update, giving the number of people in the world with wealth in total that exceeds 50% of the whole world's wealth - of billions of people. Oxfam's figure is 85 or thereabouts, and a more recent update is 67 or thereabouts. I need to add the ref-links here when I have time.

These old files of mine have links to articles etc re inequality, which I've yet to transfer here: http://www.dragonfly1.plus.com/EconomicsLINKS-2013.html and for pre-2013: http://www.dragonfly1.plus.com/LINKS.pdf - a big file (!) - but containing numerous useful links to references, authors, NGOs and thinktanks on inequality.


The negative consequences of "growthism" as Peter Cranie puts it, on inequality and long-term sustainability on a planet with finite (as well as renewable) natural resources.

The OECD on inequality: www.oecd.org/inequality.htm

NB: Inequality and GDP: An OECD study report (2014?) found that increasing inequality reduces GDP. Because austerity increases inequality, and GDP has an effect on total tax revenue, this implies that austerity - claimed by neoliberals/right-wing as a means of decreasing the deficit - is a factor that pushes the deficit upwards by reducing the total tax revenue via the route of increasing inequality and reducing GDP.

NB: AUSTERITY increases inequality. My main economics web-page has notes and links on austerity.


A hotchpotch of unordered links:

INCOME INEQUALITY in relation to growth etc: UNCTAD - Trade and Development Report 2012 United Nations - ‘Policies for inclusive and balanced growth - Report by the secretariat of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’ http://www.scribd.com/doc/108746707/UNCTAD-Trade-and-Development-Report-2012 also covers eg: The interaction between unemployment and the wage share: 1. The traditional approach: employment creation through wage restraint 2. The alternative approach: wage growth as the key determinant of demand growth. “Higher wages and lower inequality can stimulate demand and output growth …” + read Conclusions pp166-7  - versus austerity & neoliberalism! - via tweet to Monbiot by writer for www.energyroyd.org.uk - and here’s Monbiot’s related piece:

George Monbiot‘If you think we're done with neoliberalism, think again’   George Monbiot   Comment is free   The Guardian 14jan12 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/14/neoliberal-theory-economic-failure
The World's Richest 8% Earn Half of All Planetary Income & The top 1 per cent has seen its real income rise by more than 60 per cent over those two decades.  Alternet 28may13 http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/worlds-richest-8-earn-half-all-planetary-income
LIVING WAGE: Paying the Living Wage benefits business as well as employees  4nov13 new economics foundation

'British public wrongly believe rich pay most in tax, new research shows' Katie Allen 16jun14  Money   theguardian.com Thx4spotting that one Gwen! Refers to:
'UK income inequality is among the highest in the developed world and evidence shows that this is bad for almost everyone.' June 2014  The Equality Trust



Environmental inequalities

Most of this web-page concerns income inequalities, but there are other inequalities too of course.

'Division, not consensus, may be the key to fighting climate change' "Inequalities are worsening thanks to the environmental crisis. But this injustice may be our most powerful lever for action" - Razmig Keucheyan  5may14 Comment is free   theguardian.com. My response: But the guys who are bringing about climate change the most are 1. the ones least affected thus least concerned to do anything about stopping it, 2. the ones with the most power, and power that's increasing with the increase in inequality.






Academic discussions and debates on economics and inequality

Warning - these can be a struggle for non-economists (or those who haven't done a big course in economics - like me) as they are full of economics jargon and assumptions of your existing knowledge and understanding of the decades-long threads of debate on this.

Some of these can be a potential waste of time to study as many orthodox sensu lato economists often get detached from the wider considerations such as 1. economic growth and productivity are not good measures of what is best for all of us, and there are other values and resources that are of importance which don't fit into GDP figures, many of which can't be reduced to money terms (e.g. some are free yet vital), 2. economics partly concerns ways how resources and items of utility can be distributed, yet not all such resources are easily measurable, and many are finite resources, 3. what is important for humans and wildlife in the global long-term (e.g. long-term sustainability [environmental] consideration in relation to distribution and use of resources) needs to be taken into account but often appears to be disregarded by economists (nef - the New Economics Foundation for example being an exception to this criticism).
 
Prof. Simon Wren-Lewis 'Pareto, Inequality and Government Debt -  or is economics inherently right wing?' (in his blog Mainly Macro). Includes ref to welfare theorems
Pareto efficiency - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Try and spot the pitfalls in putting too much emphasis on restricting changes to those that make gains in pareto efficiency towards "pareto optimality".
Such as the state of distribution of the resource(s) at the start point, the potential for "blinkering" from consideration of other values than the materialistic ones under consideration, knock-on consequences - including consequential feedbacks both positive and negative, which might be via other things than those being considered, that whether the resource "cake" is fixed [zero-sum game scenario] or expandable, and if the latter, whether there is an upper limit [I refer for example to those global natural resource assets that are finite not renewable]).
Fundamental theorems of welfare economics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, includes mention of the Greenwald-Stiglitz theorem etc.