Friday Mix

Todays Thought

I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them: children, duties, visits, bores, relations, the things that protect married people from each other. 

-Edith Wharton, novelist (24 Jan 1862-1937)

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Todays Thought

He who is only just is cruel. Who on earth could live were all judged justly? 

-Lord Byron, poet (22 Jan 1788-1824)

The Economists Who Found the Richest People of All Time

 The Economists Who Found the Richest People of All Time

Milanovic ends with Simon Kuznets (1901–1985), who after World War II noticed that income distribution was growing more equal not only in the United States but in other advanced industrial economies—the very thing Pareto had said could never happen. This reversed the trend toward growing inequality that had prevailed during the Industrial Revolution. Kuznets concluded that inequality followed a U-shaped curve, growing during the disruptive early period of industrialization but then shrinking after it matured. At some point, an industrial democracy would become so rich that productivity differences between industry and agriculture would diminish, a surplus of capital would drive down the rate of return, and society could afford to set aside funds for pensions and government programs like unemployment insurance. That was the mid-twentieth-century reality.

It didn’t last. In the late 1970s, incomes started growing more unequal, a trend that persists to this day. It took a while for economists to notice, partly, Milanovic says, because Kuznets had lulled them into complacency. But in 2014, Thomas Piketty came along to argue, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that r > g, where r is growth in capital and g is labor income or, more broadly, growth in the broader economy. The result is an ever-increasing concentration of wealth. The process has been reversed periodically by cataclysmic world events like the Black Death of the fourteenth century, which created a labor shortage that benefited peasants, and the two world wars of the twentieth century, which extinguished capital and finished off the aristocracy. But growing wealth inequality always resumed afterward. A cataclysmic event today on the scale of the two world wars would, of course, likely finish off human civilization altogether, leaving its impact on economic distribution moot. 

Russell's Paradox - a simple explanation of a profound problem