The Theil inequality index: a flexible tool for the modern political economist

Contrary to the Gini-index, the Theil inequality index enables us to directly tie estimates of inequality to the class and ownership structure of a society. As such, it’s an indispensable tool for the political economist, requiring a-priori knowledge of political economic theory but also an inductive reading of the sources and the situation. So, why is the Gini and not the Theil index often the economists inequality metric of choice? 

The Gini-index is an often used metric to estimate inequality. As such, it is highly useful. But for the political economist it has a fundamental drawback. It does matter if people are rich or poor and it does show the extent of differences in income or wealth. But it doesn’t matter if people are laborers or a capitalists, teachers of ‘precarious workers’, landowners or farmers, men or a women or black or white. The Gini-index can be used to measure but not to analyze inequality in a direct, metric consistent way. The are metrics, like the Theil index, which do enable this. Even then, economists have come to use exactly the Gini index (and not the Theil index) as their favorite tool for the measure inequality. Why? Branco Milanovic has some interesting ideas:

After Piketty the new question: Can we, should we, afford the rich?

from Jamie Morgan’s “Piketty’s Calibration Economics: Inequality and the Dissolution of Solutions?” – an open access paper in current issue of Globalizations

In the neoliberal age, we have naturalised the rich. However, the success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has done a great deal to legitimate a rather differently inflected concern. It is now permissible to ask: can we, should we, afford the rich? Growing income and wealth inequality have gradually become areas of public concern, but this concern has become more acute, and more politically febrile, in the wake of the global financial crisis. The election victory by Syriza in Greece, and the Occupy Movement speak directly to this. Austerity responses to the crisis have distributed the fallout costs to the many from the few who benefitted most from the preceding decades. Meanwhile, central bank policy responses have created new opportunities for the global rich to become even richer.1 To a large degree, the idea that the rest of us are dragged along in the wake of the wealthy has been exposed as a myth.

Some important limitations of income inequality data

from Jonathan Nitzan

Blair Fix, a PhD student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, points to some important limitations of income inequality data. In a recent posting on capitalaspower.com, Fix shows that, in the case of the U.S., the Top 1% income share correlates not with the share of capitalists in national income (profit and interest), but with the share of corporate dividends in national income. This difference means that income-inequality data of the sort reported by Thomas Piketty and others in the World Top Income Database give a very partial and potentially biased picture of ruling class power, power that is much better proxied by all income rather than dividends alone. Blair Fix’s article: http://www.capitalaspower.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=427&p=1147#p1147

The unmistakable legacy of the plantation

from David Ruccio

Yesterday during my office hours, on the eve of the 2015 NCAA tournaments, I spent some time with a student discussing the “unmistakable whiff of the plantation” associated with major-college athletic programs. I then sent them to read Taylor Branch’s 2011 article in The Atlantic.

It just happens that, today, George Yancy published his conversation with Noam Chomsky about the unmistakable legacy of slavery and “slavery by another name” in the United States. I reproduce the first part of that conversation below.

Here are a few charts to put the current situation (with respect to racial disparities in poverty, unemployment, wealth, and incarceration) in perspective: 

Will market forces solve the problem of stagnant wages and growing inequality?

from David Ruccio

Will market forces solve the problem of stagnant wages and growing inequality? 

Zero Shocker

from Peter Radford

What with the World Economic Forum folks wading in on inequality ahead of the annual Davos shindig for the great and beautiful, here’s what Oxfam has to say:

“Global wealth is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a small wealthy elite … These wealthy individuals have generated and sustained their vast riches through their interests and activities in a few important economic sectors, including finance and pharmaceuticals/healthcare. Companies from these sectors spend millions of dollars every year on lobbying to create a policy environment that protects and enhances their interests further.”

Moreover Oxfam predicts that the top 1% will have more wealth than the bottom 99% by about 2016. Here’s their chart:

Philanthropy in the age of growing inequality

from David Ruccio

Many of my well-intentioned students are in awe of Bill Gates. He’s a rich guy, a successful businessman, who is giving away a large portion of his income to help solve the world’s economic and social problems through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. What could be more admirable?

Finance in America: Promoting inequality and waste

from Dean Baker

In the crazy years of the housing boom the financial sector was a gigantic cesspool of excess and corruption. There was big money in pushing and packaging fraudulent mortgages. The country paid a huge price for the financial sector’s sleaze.

Unfortunately, because of the Obama administration’s soft on crime approach to the bankers who became rich in the process; the industry is still a cesspool of excess and greed. Just to be clear, knowingly issuing and packaging a fraudulent mortgage is a crime, the sort of thing for which people go to jail. But thanks to the political power of the Wall Street, none of them went to jail, and in fact they got to keep the money.

Since the penalties for ripping off people are trivial to non-existent, the financial sector finds this to be a much more profitable line of business than actually providing financial services. The New York Times recently reported on the boom in the subprime market for auto loans featuring many of the same abusive practices we saw in the subprime mortgage market during the bubble years. Lenders are slapping on extra fees, changing the terms after contracts are signed, and doing all the other fun things we have come to expect from leaders in finance. The used car industry was sufficiently powerful that it was able to gain an exemption from being covered by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

US wealth inequality increased significantly from 2003 through 2013 (2 charts)

from David Ruccio

According to a new study by Fabian T. Pfeffer, Sheldon Danziger, and Robert F. Schoeni,

Through at least 2013, there are very few signs of significant recovery from the losses in wealth experienced by American families during the Great Recession. Declines in net worth from 2007 to 2009 were large, and the declines continued through 2013. These wealth losses, however, were not distributed equally. While large absolute amounts of wealth were destroyed at the top of the wealth distribution, households at the bottom of the wealth distribution lost the largest share of their wealth. As a result, wealth inequality increased significantly from 2003 through 2013; by some metrics inequality roughly doubled.

Piketty phenomena – “Riding a Wave of Growth: Global Wealth 2014” (chart)

from Edward Fullbrook

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is a leading player in what is called “the global wealth-management industry” and which in effect is plutonomy’s tactical cavalry in financial markets. BCG have just “released” a report disclosing that in the year 2013 the wealth of the world’s people worth $100 million or more increased 19.7 percent.  That compares, they say, to 3.7 percent for the wealth of sub-millionaires.  Naturally they are overjoyed at this latest redistribution.

“Wealth” meaning what? Like most people and as also with the symbol “capital”, they use “wealth” to stand for two different things, and also like most people, economists especially, they often lose track of which referent they are trying to talk about.  But we can overlook that here because the 19.7 percent and 3.7 percent refer to financial wealth and, with exceptions, that is all plutonomists and their agents really care about.

The report documents how the upward redistribution of wealth to the 0.1 percent and especially to the 0.01 percent is accelerating, in other words, how the plutonomist programme (pre-Piketty it was never reported by mass media)  is now restructuring the world at an even faster rate.  Here is a taster of how they see the next five years. 

“Piketty and Plutonomy: the Revenge of Inequality” – 1

from Edward Fullbrook

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has released a report titled “Piketty and Plutonomy: the Revenge of Inequality”.  Here is a bit about it from  the South China Morning Post.

It is interesting but not wholly surprising to see that Hong Kong has topped another index which it may not be so proud of. It leads the rankings of an analysis which shows the wealth of the uber-rich as a proportion of an economy’s gross domestic product. According to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch report, the net worth of Hong Kong’s billionaires in 2013 represented 76.4 per cent of the city’s gross domestic product.

Sweden’s billionaires were a distant second accounting for 20.7 per cent of GDP. Next was Russia with 20.1 per cent, Malaysia 18 per cent, Israel 18 per cent, Philippines 16.5 per cent and Singapore 16.3 per cent. US billionaires accounted for 13.8 per cent of GDP, Britain’s 6.2 per cent, China’s 3.5 per cent and Japan’s 1.9 per cent.

The report, titled Piketty and Plutonomy: the Revenge of Inequality, examined Thomas Piketty’s highly successful tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Analysis of plutonomy – where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few – is critical, the authors say, for understanding the complexities of today’s markets, as they go on to enumerate 10 implications of plutonomy for investors.

Piketty projects that the global private wealth to national income ratio will rise from 440 per cent in 2010 to record highs of 500 per cent by 2030, levels that were last seen in 1910. Hong Kong is also highly placed in terms of income inequality when ranked in terms of relative Gini coefficient levels. Hong Kong is third after Colombia and Brazil. One of the report’s conclusions is that unless there is policy intervention, in the longer term “emerging markets are likely to become entrenched and egregious plutonomies”.

more on Bank of America’s plutonomy report soon

All inequality all the time

from David Ruccio

It’s clear we are in the midst of an acute period of inequality: not only of grotesque levels of economic inequality (which are now well documented) but also of a wide-ranging discussion of the conditions and consequences of that extreme inequality (which appears to be taking off).

There are, of course, the deniers, like my dear friend Deirdre McCloskey. What inequality, is her mantra. The only thing that matters is economic growth, such that the amount of stuff people have today is much more than they’ve had throughout much of human history. OK, but that doesn’t tell us much about how that growth took place (it’s the surplus, Deirdre) or what it’s consequences are (on the majority who actually produce the surplus versus the tiny minority who appropriate it).

And then there are those who are actually thinking seriously about inequality, some of whose work is published in the latest issue of Science (a lot of which, unfortunately, is behind a paywall). Leave aside the silly article on econophysics (really, the existing distribution of income is a kind of “natural inequality,” which is what you would get from entropy?), the article that focuses on the psychological pathologies of the poor (what about those of the rich?), and the fact that all the economics is narrowly confined to mainstream theories (which have done more to deflect attention from, as against the wide range of heterodox theories that have actually focused on, inequality over the course of the past three decades). Just the fact that a special issue of such a prestigious journal is devoted to the problem of inequality tells us something about how it has risen to the top of our agenda.

Affluent Rules

from Peter Radford

A couple of weeks ago I led off an article with a quote from a new Gilens and Page paper – linked to in the article. Subsequently I have acquired and waded through the Gilens book “Affluence & Influence”.

Time for a few more quotes, all from page 81 of the aforementioned book:

“The complete lack of government responsiveness to the preferences of the poor is disturbing and seems consistent with the most cynical views of American politics. These results indicate that when preferences between the well-off and the poor diverge, government policy bears absolutely no relationship to the degree of support or opposition among the poor.” 

“For those proposed policy changes on which middle- and high-income respondents’ preferences diverge by at least 10 percentage points, policy responsiveness for the 90th percentile remains strong … but is indistinguishable from zero for the 50th percentile”

“But when their views differ from those of more affluent Americans, government policy appears to be fairly responsive to the well-off and virtually unrelated to the desires of low- and middle-income citizens.”

In the context of our ongoing debate over inequality I think these quotes stand for themselves.

Economic policy in a post-Piketty world

from Dean Baker

Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the 21^st Century, has done a remarkable job of focusing public attention on the growth of inequality in the last three decades and the risk that it will grow further in the decades ahead. Piketty’s basic point on this issue is almost too simple for economists to understand: if the rate of return on wealth (r) is greater than the rate of growth (g), then wealth is likely to become ever more concentrated.

This raises the obvious question of what can be done to offset this tendency towards rising inequality? Piketty’s answer is that we need a global wealth tax (GWT) to redistribute from the rich to everyone else. That is a reasonable solution if we’re just working out the arithmetic in this story, but don’t expect many politicians to be running on the GWT platform any time soon.

If we want to counter the rise in inequality that we have seen in recent decades we are going to have to find other mechanisms for reversing this upward redistribution. Specifically, we will have to look to ways to reduce the rents earned by the wealthy. These rents stem from government interventions in the economy that have the effect of redistributing income upward. In Piketty’s terminology cutting back these rents means reducing r, the rate of return on wealth.

Fortunately, we have a full bag of policy tools to accomplish precisely this task. The best place to start is the financial industry, primarily since this sector is so obviously a ward of the state and in many ways a drain on the productive economy.

“Meritocratic Extremism”

from Edward Fullbrook

Merijn is ahead of me as I have only just ordered Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The book is receiving masses of favorable media attention in the West, including from The New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Economist and The Observer where yesterday Piketty and his book occupied the cover of the newspaper’s review section. This attention is surprising given the book’s central message (one often expressed on this blog), that capitalism has now failed the world and that inequality is now accelerating at a very dangerous pace and that the rule of the ultra-rich over the everyone else is a form of gangsterism. The Observer’s feature writer went to the École d’économie de Paris to interview Piketty, and here are a couple of quotes.

Chart from the 2014 Economic Report of the President of the USA

from David Ruccio

This chart, from the 2014 Economic Report of the President [pdf], illustrates the

Trickle-down economics — total horseshit

from Lars Syll

As we’ve been aware of lately there isn’t much trickle-down going on in the USA. Unfortunately we can also see the same pattern developing in many other countries. Take for example Sweden. The figure below shows how the distribution of mean income and wealth (expressed in year 2009 prices) for the top 0.1% and the bottom 90% has changed in Sweden for the last 30 years:

Inequality

from Peter Radford

I am preparing a talk on inequality here in America, and so have been re-reading the Piketty and Saez work. Amongst the more eye-opening facts I have come across is the assertion, by Saez, that the surge in the top 1% incomes is so large that the growth of the bottom 99% amounts to only half the average [mean].

Think about that for a moment.

It would be like walking into a room full of people two feet tall with one thirty footer in the corner. The mean average is meaningless in such circumstances. We are all taught that in statistics class, but to come across such an egregious example in a dataset as large as all US tax returns is astonishing.

Guard labor (chart)

from David Ruccio

Opportunity Class

from Peter Radford

America is in such a funk nowadays that sometimes it can get exasperating. The disconnect between what average people believe and hope for, and what seems to dominate our political class is gaping wide open. To me the cause for this disconnect is obvious, and our rampant inequality sits squarely at the heart of the problem. Yet getting some of my erstwhile progressive friends to utter the word inequality has proven to be extremely difficult.

Why?

Because, to their ear it renders a harsh image of envy. And, as we are all taught, since America has no class system, and since America is the land of opportunity, and since in America hard work can get you anything, envy is simply that: a venal sentiment that debases the person harboring it and signifies that they are, somehow, un-American.

This is, of course, twaddle.

Until we are able to talk about inequality without immediately plunging into apologies for being envious we are stuck with what appears to be our favorite surrogate: opportunity. We need, apparently, to restore opportunity in this land of opportunity. Presumably between now and that restoration we are the land of something else, but we won’t give it a name just in case it sounds bad.