Paul Krugman's Weblog

This should be fun: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

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The first entry of Paul Krugman Unbound by the disappearance of Times Select:

Introducing This Blog - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog:

I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted – in fact, like many in my generation I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.

That’s the opening paragraph of my new book, The Conscience of a Liberal. It’s a book about what has happened to the America I grew up in and why, a story that I argue revolves around the politics and economics of inequality.

I’ve given this New York Times blog the same name, because the politics and economics of inequality will, I expect, be central.... In fact, let me start this blog off with a chart that’s central to how I think about the big picture, the underlying story of what’s really going on in this country. The chart shows the share of the richest 10 percent of the American population in total income – an indicator that closely tracks many other measures of economic inequality – over the past 90 years, as estimated by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez....

The Long Gilded Age:... In many important ways, though, the Gilded Age continued right through to the New Deal.... Public policy did little to limit extremes of wealth and poverty... working Americans were divided by racial, religious, and cultural issues.... The Great Compression: The middle-class society I grew up in... was created, in a remarkably short period of time, by FDR and the New Deal.... [I]ncome inequality declined drastically from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s.... Middle class America: That’s the country I grew up in... a society without extremes of wealth or poverty... of broadly shared prosperity, partly because strong unions, a high minimum wage, and a progressive tax system helped limit inequality... a society in which political bipartisanship meant something... in spite of the sinister machinations of Nixon and his henchmen.... The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.

Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s.... no other advanced economy has seen a comparable surge in inequality – even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain was a faint echo of trends here.

On the political side, you might have expected rising inequality to produce a populist backlash. Instead, however, the era of rising inequality has also been the era of “movement conservatism,” the term both supporters and opponents use for the highly cohesive set of interlocking institutions that brought Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to power, and reached its culmination, taking control of all three branches of the federal government, under George W. Bush... taxes on the rich have fallen, and the holes in the safety net have gotten bigger, even as inequality has soared. And the rise of movement conservatism is also at the heart of the bitter partisanship that characterizes politics today...

Comments

[Blissex]

«On the political side, you might have expected rising inequality to produce a populist backlash. Instead, however, the era of rising inequality has also been the era of “movement conservatism,” [ ... ] taxes on the rich have fallen, and the holes in the safety net have gotten bigger, even as inequality has soared.» But there has been a few major changes in the class/social composition of voters: nowadays for example 70% of families and essentially all voters are white well-to-do real estate owners. Also, a very large percentage of these still are entitled to generous pension benefits acquired over decades. This means that the vast majority of voters are fully vested, entitled rentiers who vote their wallets and could not care less about those lazy, useless overpaid losers called the poor, and worry about security, threats and maintaining high property and stock prices. Thus "triangulation" and all that.

[wood turtle]

Does the graph suggest that our era of income inequality may be over in possibly 10-20 years? By what means?

So Krugman has a blog. I would have thought he would have enough writing to do to keep up two columns every week.

[Aniruddha G. Kulkarni]

Thought that I am ahead of Mr. Krugman in blogging is embarrassing......

[wood turtle]

What was responsible for the large drop in 1941-42? You would think that the Great Depression would have been a large equalizing force but you can see that it wasn't. Was the equalization because of higher tax rates, or the population that was undergoing a war boom in job creation?

I know that the top marginal tax rate in the 1950's was very high. We were investing in a lot of things back then like interstate highways and a lot of defense spending that included research into computers, which was partly responsible for giving us the computer boom of the 80's and 90's.

A good subject for another post would be the history of our tax rates, to see how it affects income inequality.