I have been noticing a trend in recent discussions of income inequality. Commentators have started replacing income inequality with income inequity. At first, I thought this subtle shift was a result of ignorance. In our word-impoverished culture, the right words get swapped for incorrect similar-sounding ones all the time (e.g., “disinterested” for “uninterested”). But as […]
Continue reading →Is income inequality a bad thing? Most people would say so. It seems obvious that income inequality is based on greed and corporate welfare, right? Some of it certainly is. But some of it is based on the fact that certain people hit on an extremely useful idea at the right time, take the necessary […]
Continue reading →In another exercise in self-fulfilling prophecies, economists told the US economy that it was in full recovery, and the news jolted the stock market into another temporary jump: The US economy grew at a sizzling 5 percent annual rate last quarter, the fastest since 2003, fueled by consumer and business spending. The surge confirmed that […]
Continue reading →Curious fact: in 2012, four years after Obama took office the first time, the states that had the absolute highest rates of income inequality voted for Obama (again). Now, before you commit a fallacy of causation, let me remind you that correlation and causation are two different things. So, the fact that states with high […]
Continue reading →McDonald’s is struggling. According to CEO Don Thompson, they have “lost some of their customer relevance.” By the numbers, McDonald’s had a two percent global reduction in traffic for 2013, and, for a company that does the kind of business it does, that’s a huge amount. So what’s the problem? Thompson offered two main explanations: […]
Continue reading →The most commonly used marker for income inequality is called the Gini coefficient. Most leftists regularly refer to it when they make claims like “inequality is rising every year” or “the income gap is now worse than ever and getting even worse.” But what is the Gini coefficient, and why is it misleading? The Gini […]
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