Peter Coy, the premier economics correspondent of The New York Times, just covered a major study on inequality and fiscal progressivity that I co-authored with Alan Auerbach, an economist at UC Berkeley, and Darryl Koehler, our senior software engineer at
Hi Thomas (if this is actually you), Pls read our paper. It's posted at kotlikoff.net. It's not about changes over time in inequality. It's about properly measuring inequality as it currently exists. By doing this analysis through time, we'll be able to accurately track how inequality in remaining lifetime spending within cohort is changing. Also, we aren't negating the enormous extant inequality in the U.S. We're just saying it needs to be measured according to the guidelines of economic theory. That theory takes utility (welfare) as its focus and utility is determined by spending -- all spending, current and future, including spending, via bequests, on others. My best, Larry
From Darryl Koehler to David Card to Emanuel Saez to Gabriel Zucman to Christine and David Romer you have to admit Cal has got a world class economics faculty... In the world of "publish or perish" would you say Cal's Economics faculty puts their Economics program in the top 5 nationally?
I will be interested to learn how we live in an era where a handful of billionaires can now fly themselves into space while wages for poor and middle class families have been flat or declining for 40yrs now and it turns out we have LESS income inequality than Piketty documented. Who is funding this research the "save the neo liberal economics" movement? Larry Summers must be involved some how..
It's great that you're investigating the high effective marginal tax rates imposed on low- and moderate income workers. Casey Mulligan has also worked in this area.
Particularly brutal penalties apply to low- and moderate-income workers who get married: they can lose their healthcare, get kicked out of their apartments, go from the most to least favorable income tax filing status, and more. This is particularly perverse - as you have written, marriage and family stability are keys to economic advancement.
Please don't overlook local and regional policies which further magnify these effects. I live in Palo Alto California - a downtown on-street parking permit costs $900/year - but $93.75/year if you make less than $50,000.
Hi Thomas (if this is actually you), Pls read our paper. It's posted at kotlikoff.net. It's not about changes over time in inequality. It's about properly measuring inequality as it currently exists. By doing this analysis through time, we'll be able to accurately track how inequality in remaining lifetime spending within cohort is changing. Also, we aren't negating the enormous extant inequality in the U.S. We're just saying it needs to be measured according to the guidelines of economic theory. That theory takes utility (welfare) as its focus and utility is determined by spending -- all spending, current and future, including spending, via bequests, on others. My best, Larry
From Darryl Koehler to David Card to Emanuel Saez to Gabriel Zucman to Christine and David Romer you have to admit Cal has got a world class economics faculty... In the world of "publish or perish" would you say Cal's Economics faculty puts their Economics program in the top 5 nationally?
I will be interested to learn how we live in an era where a handful of billionaires can now fly themselves into space while wages for poor and middle class families have been flat or declining for 40yrs now and it turns out we have LESS income inequality than Piketty documented. Who is funding this research the "save the neo liberal economics" movement? Larry Summers must be involved some how..
It's great that you're investigating the high effective marginal tax rates imposed on low- and moderate income workers. Casey Mulligan has also worked in this area.
Particularly brutal penalties apply to low- and moderate-income workers who get married: they can lose their healthcare, get kicked out of their apartments, go from the most to least favorable income tax filing status, and more. This is particularly perverse - as you have written, marriage and family stability are keys to economic advancement.
Please don't overlook local and regional policies which further magnify these effects. I live in Palo Alto California - a downtown on-street parking permit costs $900/year - but $93.75/year if you make less than $50,000.
Thanks for your great contributions!
I have downloaded the JPE paper but not read it carefully yet. One question -- a paper by Chandy and Seidel from Brookings ( https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/how-much-do-we-really-know-about-inequality-within-countries-around-the-world/ )emphasizes that unerreporting of incomes by the rich makes a huge difference to conventional cross-sectional Gini indexes. Do your estimates correct for that problem?
2 points
unable to read nyt article unless you are a paid subscriber to the times
tried to sign up for yearly paid subscription have no idea whether I succeeded and if I did why am I unable to view the content.