TOO MUCH: Chronicles of Inequality

Reports

A quick look at major new inequality-related research efforts

Stealth Politics by U.S. Billionaires
American Political Science Association, September 2015
Benjamin Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew Lacombe

“The poorest billionaire,” these three Northwestern University political scientists remind us early on in this important new contribution to understanding plutocracy, “has more than one hundred times the wealth of the poorest one-percenter.”

That reality helps explain why these researchers have trained their sightson how America’s 100 top billionaires — combined wealth, $1.3 trillion — go about practicing politics.

Do our wealthiest billionaires, the three scholars ask, speak out on political issues in a way that lets the public “judge the reasoning behind their stands?” Or do top billionaires “act quietly, even secretly” and push unpopular policies without “exposing themselves to judgment or debate?”

For answers, the Northwestern researchers went looking for public comments by our biggest billionaires in two prime issue areas, taxes and Social Security. They looked back through ten years of public debate. They found, from billionaires, a deafening silence.

On taxes, for instance, only 26 of the 100 billionaires made even one public utterance about tax policy over the course of the decade studied.

The billionaires showed no such reticence with their wallets. The vast majority give generously to both candidates and political organizations.

The patterns of billionaire political involvement, the Northwestern researchers note, appear to indicate that many billionaires “deliberately pursue the strategy we are calling ‘stealth politics,’ attempting to influence public policy in directions not favored by average Americans while avoiding public statements about policy.”

Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker’s Pay: Why It Matters and Why It’s Real
Economic Policy Institute, September 2, 2015
Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel

Why is corporate executive compensation soaring while worker pay stagnates? In a nutshell: Most all the gains from the increasing productivity of America’s workers are going to America’s bosses.

Between 1973 and 2014, the latest Economic Policy Institute data document, productivity in the United States jumped 72.2 percent. Hourly worker compensation nudged up just 9.2 percent.

And what if increases in hourly pay had matched increases in productivity? In that case, EPI researchers conclude, the United States would have seen “no rise in income inequality” since 1973.

What Does Inequality Have to Do With Human Rights?
Political Economy Research Institute, August 2015
Radhika Balakrishnan, James Heintz, and Diane Elson

Conventional economic thinking, observes this wide-reaching new paper, “sidesteps the question of the consequences of inequality.” And no consequence may be more sidestepped than the impact of economic inequality on basic human rights.

Everyone in the world, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.” Top-heavy distributions of wealth, authors Balakrishnan, Heintz, and Elson show, undermine all those rights. Nation states, they conclude, have “an implicit obligation within the human rights framework” to consider inequality’s impact and “move towards a more just distribution of income.”

Also newly released: Corporations that lavish stock options on their top executives, Notre Dame business school researchers detail in a study published this past summer, expose their customers to more unsafe products. The study traced the pay and performance of 386 CEOs over eight years. Hefty option grants, the researchers suggest, give CEOs an incentiveto take risks because they benefit enormously from future increases in share prices but lose nothing if share prices tumble . . .

Americans believe that rich households making over $2.5 million a year should be paying three times more of their income in state and local taxes than families making $30,000 a year, says new research from Wallet Hub, the online personal finance site. In contemporary real life, Americans in the top 1 percent pay state and local taxes at about half the rate that middle- and low-income Americans pay . . .

Sociologists at Yale University’s Institute for Network Science have foundthat the more the rich flaunt their wealth, the more the social fabric tears. Wealthy people who “find out that their neighbors don’t have the resources they do,” the study shows, become less likely to help them — “or anyone else.”