Income Inequality May Take Toll on Economic Growth By ANNIE LOWREY WASHINGTON Income inequality has soared to the highest levels since the Great Depression, and the recession has done little to reverse the trend, with the top 1 percent of earners taking 93 percent of the income gains in the first full year of the recovery.
The yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots and the political questions that gap has raised about the plight of the middle class has given rise to anti-Wall Street sentiment and animated the presidential campaign. Now, a growing body of economic research suggests that it might mean lower levels of economic growth and slower job creation in the years ahead, as well. "Growth becomes more fragile" in countries with high levels of inequality like the United States, said Jonathan D. Ostry of the International Monetary Fund, whose research suggests that the widening disparity since the 1980s might shorten the nation's economic expansions by as much as a third. Reducing inequality and bolstering growth, in the long run, might be "two sides of the same coin," research published last year by the I.M.F. concluded.... Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/business/economy/income-inequality-may-take-toll-on-growth.html http://tinyurl.com/9xeldo4 --- In [email protected], "authfriend" <authfriend@...> wrote: > > > Each of the pie segments represents 20 percent of the population, > grouped by income, the size of each segment representing its share of > the nation's wealth. The bottom two 20-percent segments are so small you > can barely see them, 0.2 percent and 0.1 percent. That's 40 percent of > the U.S. population that owns only 0.3 percent of the nation's wealth > (note that is not 3 percent but 3/10 of a percent). > > > [http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/03/opinion/strogatz6-fig2/s\ > trogatz6-fig2-blog427.gif] > > > > A survey was conducted recently of thousands of people to measure how > they thought income was distributed in this country. Surprisingly, they > assumed the distribution was much more equal than it actually is: 9 > percent for the bottom and 59 percent for the top. > > The study is discussed in detail here, with several other revealing > charts: > > http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/americans-want-to-li\ > ve-in-a-much-more-equal-country-they-just-dont-realize-it/260639/ > <http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/americans-want-to-l\ > ive-in-a-much-more-equal-country-they-just-dont-realize-it/260639/> >
