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 ［转贴］《Forbes》: The Inequality Imperative |
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hwarrensen
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作者：hwarrensen 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
The Inequality Imperative https://www.forbes.com/home/free_forbes/2005/1010/064.html
Dan Seligman, 10.10.05
The notorious income gap keeps widening. This has been going on for a long time, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
Like trout irresistibly drawn to flashy lures, the liberal media are always a good bet to get themselves in trouble when the subject of inequality is dangled before them. It happened again the other day when the Census Bureau released income data for 2004. Instantly in high-dudgeon mode, New York Times editorialists noted that the report showed income inequality near alltime highs, then added: "Income inequality is an economic and social ill, but the Administration and the congressional majority don't seem to recognize that."
Given the editorialists' recurring objections to George Bush's tax cuts, their implication here was clear: The Bush Administration has been especially awful in creating inequality. That implication is wrong. The reality is that measured inequality has been rising steadily for close to 30 years and hit successive new highs in the Carter, Reagan, elder Bush and Clinton administrations before doing the exact same thing under the younger Bush.
Getting to Gini
That dotted line depicts the unreal world of perfect equality. The solid line depicts reality in 2004, with half of U.S. family income going to the top 20%. The Gini coefficient, 0.466, is defined to equal twice the shaded area.
The standard measure of inequality is the Gini coefficient, signifying the extent to which a society deviates from absolute equality. If everybody has the same income, the coefficient is 0； if the entire GDP belongs to one person, the coefficient is 1. In the U.S. the latest reported coefficient is 0.466. In case you are wondering, it rose more under Clinton－－from 0.433 to 0.462－－than under any of those other chaps. It rose by only 0.004 during George W. Bush's first four years. In case you are also wondering how many times Times editorialists complained about Clinton's inequality record, the answer is zero. The Washington Post has been equally tendentious, and at one point (Sept. 25, 1998) it ran a front-page story on the 1997 income report in which it stated firmly that the census data showed "income inequality did not increase," even though the data clearly pointed to a substantial one-year increase of 0.004. There was no correction.
But ultimately it is foolish to attribute inequality to government programs. There are some programs, e.g., tax and welfare measures, that affect income equality, but they tend not to be decisive. If they were, then Gini coefficients would not also be rising in developed countries across Europe and Japan－－even though many of these countries have relatively homogeneous populations and Social Democratic governments committed to egalitarian principles. It is true that the Gini numbers remain a lot lower in most other developed countries. Recent figures for Japan have been 0.249, for Germany 0.283, for France 0.327. But those countries have paid heavy prices for their relative income equality. Just about all of them have had lower growth rates than the U.S., and most of them (an exception is Japan) have far higher unemployment rates. The reality is that in democratic free-market societies, more inequality tends to mean more growth.
In some measure the long-standing increase in the U.S. Gini reflects an increase in female-headed households, which tend to be poorer, and in two-income households, which are relatively affluent. Another source of inequality has been the decline of organized labor. It now represents only 8% of the U.S. private-sector labor force, meaning that fewer employers are now committed to standardized wage rates. In the great global economy they are also under new pressure to hold down wages.
The driving force behind income inequality has been meritocracy, i.e., workers get what they're worth. And in periods of boundless technological innovation, like the present, brains and talent are suddenly worth a lot more. The demand for mental skills has exploded. The total U.S. labor force has grown by a little more than one-third in the past two decades, but managerial and professional jobs have roughly doubled, from 24 million to more than 48 million.
Eleven years after its explosive debut, The Bell Curve, by the late Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, remains one of the best available guides to the current state of inequality. The book described the rise of a new "cognitive elite" and of a world in which the great dividing force is intelligence. And as we discover by examining psychometric bell curves, inequalities in human intelligence are real and inescapable. There is a high likelihood that those Ginis will go right on climbing.
作者：hwarrensen 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 ［转贴］《Forbes》: The Inequality Imperative -- hwarrensen - (4926 Byte) 2005-10-16 周日, 12:46 (824 reads)
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