Following on from the previous post, here are two other places where they talk about the consequences of inequality:

Mark Thoma, yet again, brings us a piece from the New York Times which discusses what can happen in a city when the middle ranges of income leaves, so that only the rich and poor are left. Basically, the two become separate cultures.

With a dwindling middle class, rich and poor become more separate. Alan
Berube, an author of the Brookings study, said a two-tiered marketplace can
develop: Whole Foods for the upper classes, bodegas for the lower, with no
competition from stores courting the middle…

“This trend toward living and interacting with people who are like you is
intensifying a lot,” said Professor Gyourko, who lives in the affluent suburb of
Swarthmore, Pa. “I do not meet the full range of incomes and social classes
within my neighborhood. Well, think about what happens if metropolitan areas
like New York, San Francisco and the like turn into my suburb. You’ll have even
less interaction. The most interesting and potentially foreboding implication of
this sorting is that it changes the way we … Continue reading

The studies of Piketty and Saez seem to be becoming the standard for the description of inequality within the USA. Every now and then they update their figures, and recently they published an updated set that described what happened to American Inequality in 2004. There has been a rush of comments about the numbers on some economic weblogs. So I’ll collect them together here – I don’t have anything to add myself: it’s fascinating to see this kind of real-world issue being debated among experts in public.

First, the update itself is in an Excel spreadsheet here, at the web site of Emmanual Saez.

Paul Krugman (in the New York Times, but reposted in part by Mark Thoma here) describes the main feature as follows:

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose
long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for
research on this topic … show that even if you exclude capital gains from
a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of
Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of
the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only … Continue reading

I’ve just changed the design at my nonblog web site.

Why? Well, because it was pretty hideous before, and also because I recently put together a web site for my better half, and I thought my own place deserved a bit of spit and polish. I’m not really sure about the colour scheme, but I’ll give it a week or so and see how it looks after that time.

Update: I just made a few more changes so it looks better in Internet Explorer. It still looks best in Firefox, but the differences are now pretty minor.

For anyone who cares about such things, the colour scheme was inspired by the Dark Rose design by Rose Fu at the css Zen Garden, which has lots of great ideas for anyone looking to design a site.

Update 2: I added fancier scrolling behaviour, for Firefox only, so that only the main column moves as you scroll the page (you have to look at one of the longer pages to see it, or have your browser in a small window). There are workarounds that let you simulate this CSS … Continue reading

Via Brad DeLong, a piece in the LA Times that covers some of the ground I cover  about movies in Chapter 9, although the LA Times has better stories. Here are a few excerpts, but it’s worth reading the whole thing:

That no one can know whether a film will hit or miss has been an
uncomfortable suspicion in Hollywood at least since novelist and
screenwriter William Goldman enunciated it in his classic 1983 book
"Adventures in the Screen Trade." If Goldman is right and a future
film’s performance is unpredictable, then there is no way studio
executives or producers, despite all their swagger, can have a better
track record at choosing projects than an ape throwing darts at a
dartboard.

That’s a bold statement, but these days it is hardly conjecture: With
each passing year the unpredictability of film revenue is supported by
more and more academic research…

What the research shows is that even the most professionally made films
are subject to many unpredictable factors that arise during production
and marketing, not to mention the inscrutable taste of the audience. It
is these … Continue reading

RAD points me to a New York Times article by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt about buying and selling organs. That’s organ as in kidney or liver, not organ as in church or Hammond. It’s an interesting entry to a very topical topic: one that still has shock value but which we are going to hear about more in the future.

My point of view, unsurprisingly, is that I don’t trust market
mechanisms to deal with the problem. This essay is a starting point for
thinking about it. I hope to follow it up later with a second attempt.

* * *

The reason people are talking about buying and selling kidneys
is that organ transplants are safe and cheaper than they used to be, so lots of
sick people could benefit from an increase in organ donations, and so that
spare kidney you’ve been keeping around is now a very popular kidney, used and
second-hand though it be. So why, ask Dubner and Levitt, don’t we let people
buy and sell their kidneys? After all, “most people can live safely on one
kidney”, … Continue reading