Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Krugman v Kling on income

Arnold Kling has an excellent commentary on Krugman's recent NYTimes piece complaining about increasing income inequality in the US.

I remember, back in the day, when Krugman's MIT site and Phillip Greenspun's homepage were high points of the Internet. Sadly, Krugman has degenerated into a complete hack, and his NYTimes article doesn't even read as if it was written by an economist. (Topel, labor economist at U Chicago, felt pretty much the same way).

Topel also pointed out that the very tip of the income distribution is made up of atheletes/entertainers and CEOs (top .0001%), and technological change and stock ownership explains why their incomes rose so dramatically, and that these aren't bad things. He also points out that the rich have become richer, and the poor poorer, but the two are not linked and that economics has nothing to say about this being societally harmful.

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