Interesting chart (By way of some nice ranting by Dr. Traven.): I didn’t click around enough to see the data sources. I presume that’s Japan up there on the left. I’d not seen this before, so I’m suspicious. Also, given how hard it is to pull a meaningful average out of a highly skewed distribution, [...]
This is an interesting post on income inequality across the nation’s states. What it adds to his prior posting is a brief synopsis of Jamie Galbraith’s model of what’s going on for the folks at both ends of the spectrum. I find it notable that both groups live on a raft. The rich raft is [...]
This chart is so cool, that I can’t resist in-lining it directly; I hope it’s creator doesn’t mine. The states are sorted poor to wealthy, vertical scale is log of constant dollars. The upper lines are the median income of the top 10% while the lower lines are the bottom 10%. Horizontally shows 40 years. [...]
From a press release For example, low-income households, or those at the 10th percentile of the income distribution, spend approximately $8,900 per year per child, while high-income families, or those at the 90th percentile, spend $50,000 per child. I find that hard to believe. Where do people in the bottom 10% find $9K/child/year? According to [...]
This deserves highlighting. According to this chart lawyers salaries split sharply after they leave school. Some of them are paid a king’s ransom while other’s are paid quite pedestrian salaries. I suspect this is true for most highly educated people. Larry Katz was recently quoted as stating that “Over the past 20 years things have [...]
The RealtyTrac web site shows real estate foreclosure data for the US. It’s thought provoking to look at places your familiar with thru this somewhat specialized lens. What you want to do here is get to their maps quickly. To do that you: enter a zipcode select a house at random on that house’s abbreviated [...]
Possibly last posting about the World Household Wealth Distirbution study. First off I’m bemused by two articles in the New York Times. One about giant purses: “…clients old and new staggering under the weight of huge purses and griping about neck pain. “It’s an epidemic,” Ms. Ehrlich said. “We’re busier than ever before right now [...]
Here’s another interesting point from Polarized America. When your designing your governance scheme one of the levers you can adjust is how much consensus is required before it’s possible to make major changes to the rules. For example here in the US it’s is very tedious to change the constitution. Another example is the Senate’s [...]
I’ve been awaiting this book for months; and I finally got a copy. Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches by Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. I paid full price, which is both totally out of character and an indication of how very important I think this book is, but [...]
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