Category Inequality
No, we really don’t want to reduce inequality
A few weeks ago, Mike Moffatt wrote an op-ed that ran in the Ottawa Citizen and several other PostMedia papers to the effect that there simply isn't the will on the part of 99% of the population to do much about inequality: if there were, there'd be more popular support for the sort of tax-and-redistribution […]
Soldiers of fortune, department chairs, and CEO pay
Assume ten identical young men. One of them is needed to do a dangerous job which creates disutility for the person doing it. Assume they have diminishing marginal utility of consumption. Assume (though a weaker assumption can get the same results) that the utility function is separable in consumption and the type of job. There […]
“Just one more dying quail a week, and you’re in Yankee Stadium”
The incomes earned by elite athletes are often cited as examples in arguments to the effect that high incomes aren't a problem that need solving. If large numbers of people are willing – eager, even – to give small sums of money to watch Wilt Chamberlain play basketball, then on what grounds would anyone begrudge […]
Canada’s redistribution policy: take from the rich, give to the … median?
Much of the public debate on income inequality focuses on what is happening with market incomes. But most people generally accept that a certain level of inequality in market incomes is inevitable, and indeed necessary in order to provide the sort of incentives that generate economic growth. What really matters is inequality of income net […]
Why the Gini?
Stephen Gordon recently posted an excellent analysis of trends in income inequality in Canada and elsewhere. Stephen, like almost all of the other authors cited in his post and the subsequent discussion, measured inequality using the Gini coefficient. The very next day, I saw a paper by Francesca Greselin arguing that the Gini is inferior to […]
Can demographics explain why the income shares of high earners have increased?
The increasing concentration of incomes among a small number of high earners has been documented at length here ([1], [2], [3]) and elsewhere. Any sensible response to this development has to be based on at least a partial understanding of how and why this trend began – and we still don't have a theory that […]
On trends in inequality in Canada, the United Kingdom and Sweden
The Conference Board released a study on trends in inequality, so I decided to update the data from this old post. Here's what I found: if you measure inequality using the Gini index, you'd conclude that after increasing during the 1980's, inequality levels had stabilised since 1995.
Wealth and Its Distribution: Tomorrow is Yesterday
Wealth and income inequality is a big issue and I thought some historical perspective on wealth inequality might be interesting given that my research to date has led me to conclude that little has changed for the bottom of the wealth distribution at least in terms of relative wealth shares. While there has been the […]
Asset Management
My brother thinks of himself as a farmer, which he is. But I think of him as an asset manager. He has chosen to hold his assets in land, tractors, ploughs; and that's him, driving his tractor, pulling his plough over his land, fixing the tractor, fixing the plough, managing his assets. He earns his […]
Reconciling the Minimum Wage Literature
I'm a health and fitness nut, so I read a lot of health studies as well as using my own body as a guinea pig. I've discovered a lot of things – for instance, I don't know if using creatine monohydrate leads to more strength gains than using a placebo, but I do know it makes you […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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