Yet more from Mark Thoma, who seems to collect interesting information like I collect  collecty things.  He posts a series of graphs from the latest Piketty and Saez paper on trends in incomes — in this case particularly incomes at the very top. In short, the income share of the top 1% took a slight dip between 2000 and 2002 but it looks like a brief post-dot-com interruption in the general trend of increasing inequality starting in the 1970s.

This paper summarizes the
main findings of the recent studies that have constructed top income and wealth
shares series over the century for a number of countries using tax statistics.
Most countries experience a dramatic drop in top income shares in the first part
of the century due to a precipitous drop in large wealth holdings during the
wars and depression shocks. Top income shares do not recover in the immediate
post war decades. However, over the last 30 years, top income shares have
increased substantially in English speaking countries but not at all in
continental Europe countries or Japan. This increase is due to an unprecedented
surge in top wage … Continue reading

Which matters more, the income of the average citizen or the average income of citizens?

Via Brad DeLong and Ruy Teixeira, the story of the American economy in the last five years is summarized in one page by the Economic Policy Institute.

Their headlines are:

An economy is a big thing, and there are a lot of stories in it, some happy and some sad. Productivity, debt, growth, uncertainty, technological advances, poverty, millionaires. Averages give only a very limited picture, and how you evaluate the overall picture depends on which stories you think are important.

Me, I think the income of average Americans is more important than the average income of Americans.

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From The Guardian, a piece on how the free market is even screwing up football/soccer, or at least some parts of it, and how FIFA may provide an example of how to make things better for poor countries.

The forces of globalisation are hindering the chances of another Derby
or Nottingham Forest pipping Chelsea or Manchester United for the
league title as they did in the 70s but are likely to make this
summer’s World Cup more competitive, according to a World Bank
economist.

An in-depth study of the free market in football confirms
what Premiership fans have long suspected: the influx of overseas stars
has improved skill levels but at the expense of growing inequality
between the elite clubs and the rest.

Yet national teams of poor countries have benefited from mobility of
labour says an article by Branko Milanovic in the latest Review of
International Political Economy. Since the national teams of rich
countries cannot buy the best in the way that their clubs can, when a
Didier Drogba returns home from Chelsea, the Ivory Coast team gains
from his experience.

Using
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An article I am working on, hoping to publish somewhere…

Once upon a time, 35 years ago to be precise, the British
beer industry was dominated by five big breweries. It had been that way for a
long time, and it didn’t look like changing: fifty years had passed since any new
ale breweries had been founded. Sure, some people complained about the poor
quality of beer, but they were probably just dreaming about a non-existent
golden age and grumbling about progress. After all, if cask beers from small
breweries were really better than the brand-name, large-scale production of the
big brewers, why had the small breweries gone out of business? If people really
wanted a different kind of beer, surely companies would be competing to provide
it for them?

But then a strange thing happened. As many people know, some
of these grumblers got together to form the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).
CAMRA held local beer festivals, published an annual Good Beer Guide, and local CAMRA groups published newsletters that helped
to keep information as well as ale flowing. And they didn’t stop there: … Continue reading

There is an interesting dynamic to the  battle over the next-generation of DVDs. In one corner there is Microsoft, Toshiba, Intel and some others supporting the HD-DVD format. In the other is Sony and most of the Hollywood studios, supporting Blu-ray.

It is clearly in the interests of all the companies to agree on one standard.

"The damage the industry does to itself by not
choosing a format is enormous," said Brad Anderson, vice chairman and
chief executive officer of Best Buy, one of the largest U.S. consumer
electronics and appliances retail chains. "Two incompatible formats is
as much a nightmare as you can make for consumers," he added.

And yet they can’t.

"There’s no question that a format war is not a
good idea but I don’t see what we can do about it except push on and
convince everybody that a revolutionary high-definition disc (Blu-ray)
is better than an evolutionary high-definition disc (HD-DVD)," [a Sony spokesperson] said
during a news conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Ted Schadler of Forrester Research says that for whoever wins it is a pyrrhic victory "Eventually they both lose." … Continue reading

I’d just like to say that Mark Steyn’s article The war on terror is the real women’s issue in Maclean’s is the worst piece of crap I’ve read in a long time. I think every single line has something wrong with it – a gratuitous insult, a twisted argument, a non sequitur, or just something plain stupid.

I guess it’s one way to get attention, but it is adolescent through and through.

Thanks to This Mag for raising my blood pressure.

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Russell Smith in The Globe and Mail writes about California’s new law in California puts lens rangers on notice. Here’s what the new law says

The statute forbids two types of invasion of private space: one literal, one virtual. It makes it an offence to take pictures or sound recordings of anyone "engaging in a personal or familial activity and the physical invasion occurs in a manner that is offensive to a reasonable person," and it also forbids doing so to a person "engaging in a personal or familial activity under circumstances in which the plaintiff had a reasonable expectation of privacy, through the use of a visual or auditory enhancing device, regardless of whether there is a physical trespass."

In other words, not only is standing in the subject’s way or pushing your camera into her car window unacceptable, but so is using a zoom lens 50 metres away from her bedroom.

Smith notes that "U.S. public reaction to the law is overwhelmingly positive" and is sympathetic himself. But he has reservations…

And yet, and yet . . . the people who are thrilled to see their … Continue reading