As noted in the methodology section, the CPS income numbers understate various sources of income: for wealthy people, capital gains are excluded, and interest and dividend income are underreported; middle-income people are missing the value of what employers pay for their social security taxes and health and retirement benefits; and for lower- and moderate-income people, there is underreporting of pension and government transfer income plus the exclusion of the earned income tax credit and other noncash benefits, particularly Medicare and Medicaid. Overall, it is hard to know what the distribution would be if all the data for a wider definition of income were available.
Other articles referencing the study:
"America's upper middle class is thriving"
http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/news/economy/upper-middle-class/index.html
"Upper Middle Class Sees Big Gains, Research Finds"
http://www.wsj.com/articles/upper-middle-class-sees-big-gains-research-finds-1466554177?mod=e2tw
"The Upper Middle Class Has Gotten Richer"
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/277854
I am still looking for some debunking/interpretation of the study that isnât just surface reinforcement of preexisting opinions.
Update: one such article
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/what-does-it-take-to-be-upper-middle-class/ ]]]>middleclass uppermiddleclass inequality incomeinequality policy politics society stephenrosehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cf87f77c9c15/Toward Humane Tech â Medium2016-01-17T02:50:37+00:00
https://medium.com/@anildash/toward-humane-tech-23a20405681a#.96a99v7cf
robertogrecoanildash 2016 technology siliconvalley inclusion inclusivity diversity acceptance gender language communication compensation responsibility attribution environment privacy security inequality incomeinequality law legal disruption culture societyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7afb31798d49/Why Affluent Parents Put So Much Pressure on Their Kids - The Atlantic2015-11-25T01:30:55+00:00
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/pressure-affluent-parents/417045/
robertogrecoOn the surface, the rich kids seem to be thriving. They have cars, nice clothes, good grades, easy access to health care, and, on paper, excellent prospects. But many of them are not navigating adolescence successfully.
The rich middle- and high-school kids [Arizona State professor Suniya] Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm.* They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average. Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft.
Why is this? As Rosin reports, a major factor is âpressureââfrom parents, teachers, themselves, whoeverâto excel not just in school but in a host of other activities as well. All of that pressure and the resulting hyper-activity seem to leave kids feeling very tired, very inadequate, and very alone. No wonder they are miserable.
But that does little to answer the question of why there is so much pressure in the first place. It turns out that there is a pretty straightforwardâand ultimately very troublingâanswer: Itâs because the competition for a place among the countryâs well-off is so vicious. To secure one of those spots, kids must gain admission to a relatively small number of elite colleges and universities, which âessentially did not grow but rather became increasingly selectiveâ since the 1970s. (By contrast, in Canada, where higher education âlacks a steep prestige hierarchy,â the admissions competition is less dire.)
In part, this is because of what sort of people make up America's elite today: not the owners of family businesses but professionals with impressive educations. Family businesses are heritable; education, by contrast, is not. No matter how successful parents are, their kids have to earn their own way in (albeit, of course, with the incredible advantages that come from having highly educated, well-off parents). As sociologist Hilary Levey Friedman put it in an interview with Jessica Grose at Slate, âIf youâre a doctor, lawyer, or MBAâyou canât pass those on to your kids.â
All of this results in what the economists Garey and Valerie Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, brilliantly termed âthe rug rat race.â As they wrote in a 2010 paper, âThe increased scarcity of college slots appears to have heightened rivalry among parents, which takes the form of more hours spent on college preparatory activities.â In their findings, the rug rat race takes place primarily among the most educated parents, because there simply arenât enough spots at elite schools for less-educated parents to even really have a shot, especially as the competition accelerates. Itâs for this reason that the most educated parents spend the most hours parenting, even though they are giving up the most in wages by doing so.
This intense competition does more than serve as a giant sieve for college admissions; it is also a intensive training process for the actual skills that it takes to succeed at the upper echelons of the American economy. As one soccer parent told Friedman during her research on parenting in such a competitive culture, âI think itâs important for [my son] to understand that [being competitive] is not going to just apply here, itâs going to apply for the rest of his life. Itâs going to apply when he keeps growing up and heâs playing sports, when heâs competing for school admissions, for a job, for the next whatever.â Friedman concludes, âSuch an attitude prepares children for winner-take-all settings like the school system and lucrative labor markets.â
This leaves affluent parents with little choice. Even for those who fear the consequences of the pressure on their kids, they may figure itâs worth getting through a few tough years for a lifetime of economic security. One thing that bolsters this rationale: the steep dropoff in incomes and wealth from the very, very rich to Americaâs struggling middle class. There is a lot to be gained by being among the very elite. If that's something you have a reasonable shot at, thereâs a good argument for taking it.
The conversation about the intense pressure on kids is normally focused on parenting culture, on what parents are doing wrong. But this all needs to be considered in the broader context of the American economy. The pressure on kids may come from parents, but itâs the result of systemic forces so much bigger and so much more powerful than anything any household has control over.
In a sense, what wealthy parents are doing is working. There is very little social mobility in America, up or down, and most of those born into the richest and best-educated households will someday run their own high-earning, highly educated households.
Then again, itâs not working at all. There is very little social mobility in America, up or down, and most of those born into the poorest and least-educated households will someday run their own low-earning, poorly educated households. How is it that a country so prosperous shines its munificence on so few? And, for those who do find success, why does getting there leave them feeling so hopeless?"]]>education affluence precarity economics inequality society socialmobility us incomeinequality fear parenting schools learning competition fragility hannahrosin pressure anxiety stress selectivity colleges universities rebeccarosen gareyramey valerieramey admissions scarcity jessicagross suniyaluthar paloalto siliconvalleyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8210c1676020/High-income Americans are more segregated than ever | Stanford Graduate School of Education2015-09-14T04:55:29+00:00
https://ed.stanford.edu/news/high-income-americans-are-more-segregated-ever
robertogrecoinequality seanreardon kendrabischoff segregation 2015 us civics socialgood publicgood incomeinequalityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b09aece46596/Why America's favorite anarchist thinks most American workers are slaves | Making Sen$e | PBS NewsHour2014-09-05T18:59:37+00:00
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/why-americas-favorite-anarchist-thinks-most-american-workers-are-slaves/
robertogrecodavidgraeber 2014 economics universalbasicincome productivity wageslavery labor work bullshitjobs bureaucracy switzerland us policy government creativity art music anarchism anarchy socialism libertarianism libertarians friedrichhayek socialwelfare namibia democracy markets deirdremccloskey donmccloskey communitarianism incomeinequality inequality motivation ubi hayekhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:819dfe845d69/Robert Reich (Work and Worth)2014-08-04T23:17:57+00:00
http://robertreich.org/post/93632709170
robertogreco2014 robertreich worlk labor inequality incomeinequality income pay economics productivity wages capitalism purpose value moneyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f451bc5ff8b0/Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic2014-07-23T19:05:04+00:00
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere
robertogrecowilliamderesiewicz education class academia experience society us socialwork admissions colleges universities highered highereducation clergy lifeofthemind ivyleague 2014 leadership servicelearning glamor ineqaulity incomeinequalityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9e73513c0ed2/Changed Life of the Poor: Better Off, but Far Behind - NYTimes.com2014-05-13T19:05:38+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/business/economy/changed-life-of-the-poor-squeak-by-and-buy-a-lot.html
robertogrecopoverty inequality economics materialism consumerism 2014 possessions wealth incomeinequality income universalbasicincome socialsafetynet ubihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5af183d8b43a/To Have and Have Not | Jedediah Purdy on Capital in the Twenty-First Century2014-04-24T21:39:54+00:00
https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/to-have-and-have-not/
robertogreco g. He admits this idea wonât get much traction at present, but recommends it as a fixed point in political imagination, a measure of what would be worth doing and how far we have to go to get there.
Itâs an excellent idea, but it also shows the limits of Pikettyâs argument. He has no theory of how the economy works that can replace the optimistic theories that his numbers devastate. Numbers â powerful ones, to be sure â are what he has. He has counted things that were harder to count before now â income, asset value â and adorned the bottom line with some splendid formulas for holding onto their importance. But r > g, as Piketty readily admits, is not a theory of anything; it is a shorthand generalization of some historical facts about moneyâs tendency to make money. Those facts held in the agrarian and industrial societies of Europe and North America in the nineteenth century and seem to be holding in todayâs industrial and post-industrial economies. But these are very different worlds. Is there something constant that unifies different versions of inequality â that unites plantation owners and Apple shareholders, in their shared privilege above bondsman and Best-Buy techs â or is the inequality itself the only constant? Without answers to these questions, we donât have a theory of capitalism, just a time-lapse picture of it.
This is not only a theoretical problem. It bears on whether past is prologue, whether inequality yesterday forecasts inequality tomorrow. Without a theory of how the economy produces and allocates value, we canât know whether r > g will hold into the future. This is essential to whether Piketty can answer his critics, who have argued that we shouldnât worry much. They claim that rates of return on capital should fall rapidly toward that of the overall economy, as much mainstream theory would predict, or that the overall growth rate will spike with new technological innovations. Either would greatly blunt r > g. Piketty doesnât really have an answer to these challenges, other than the weight of the historical numbers.
The lack of a general theory is a bit of an epistemic irony. Pikettyâs work is a triumph of the Enlightenment aim to make the world intelligible, demystifying it by showing us the patterns that emerge from millions of facts. But by calling for economics to become a historical science, concerned with what has happened and is happening rather than with evermore refined mathematical models, he carries out a massive epistemic dethroning. History happens only once. Its ânatural experimentsâ are few and highly incomplete. And casting light on big and inconvenient facts, he also points out an area of darkness; ignorance where we had been lulled into thinking we had knowledge."
âŠ
"Piketty shows that capitalismâs attractive moral claims â that it can make everyone better off while respecting their freedom â deserve much less respect under our increasingly âpureâ markets than in the mixed economies that dominated the North Atlantic countries in the mid-20th century. It took a strong and mobilized left to build those societies. It may be that capitalism can remain tolerable only under constant political and moral pressure from the left, when the alternative of democratic socialism is genuinely on the table. Piketty reminds us that the reasons for the socialist alternative have not disappeared, or even weakened. We are still seeking an economy that is both vibrant and humane, where mutual advantage is real and mutual aid possible. The one we have isnât it.
Reading Piketty gives one an acute sense of how much we have lost with the long waning of real political economy, especially the radical kind. As mentioned, Piketty does not expect his one real proposal, a modest wealth tax, to go far in this political environment. Ideas need movements, as movements need ideas. Weâve been short on both. In trying to judge what to do about Pikettyâs grim forecasts, there is a crevasse between âwrite op-eds advocating higher tax ratesâ and ârebuild the left.â It isnât Pikettyâs job to fill that gap, but he does show just how wide it yawns, and how devastating is the absence it represents."]]>thomaspiketty economics inequality democracy capitalism capital 2014 jedidiahpurdy freedom wealth incomeinequality inheritance taxes morality democraticsocialism time historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:146c22cc4f6c/Anti-Government Left: Elizabeth Warren Is Stronger Than Bill de Blasio | New Republic2014-01-16T01:49:37+00:00
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116193/anti-government-left-elizabeth-warren-stronger-bill-de-blasio
robertogrecoelizabethwarren left finance financialcrisis government money politics 2014 billdeblasio noamscheiberpolitics policy populism corruption systemschange us inequality banking incomeinequalityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:61775ffa3e25/Black Friday and the Race to the Bottom : The New Yorker2013-12-04T06:01:10+00:00
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/12/black-friday-and-the-minimum-wage.html
robertogreco2013 georgepacker minimumwage walmart wages salaries work labor economics incomeinequality inequalityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9d70f9ef71e8/As Inequality Grows, Swiss To Vote On Curbing Executive Pay : Parallels : NPR2013-11-23T23:57:05+00:00
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/11/22/246678622/swiss-inequality-is-growing-would-curbing-exec-pay-matter
robertogrecoswitzerland pay income incomeinequality inequality policy executivepay 2013 europe politics economicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3dfbd584b943/Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User - Ian Bogost - The Atlantic2013-11-13T19:43:52+00:00
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/hyperemployment-or-the-exhausting-work-of-the-technology-user/281149/
robertogrecolabor 2013 ianbogost employment economics johnmaynardkeynes leisurearts work leisure hustling wealth income incomeinequality wealthdistribution anxiety hyperemployment unemployment time artleisure keyneshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:85f060bea201/The Fallacy of Success2013-10-11T03:36:22+00:00
http://kottke.org/13/10/the-fallacy-of-success
robertogrecoThat a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey. Any live man has succeeded in living; any dead man may have succeeded in committing suicide. But, passing over the bad logic and bad philosophy in the phrase, we may take it, as these writers do, in the ordinary sense of success in obtaining money or worldly position. These writers profess to tell the ordinary man how he may succeed in his trade or speculation-how, if he is a builder, he may succeed as a builder; how, if he is a stockbroker, he may succeed as a stockbroker. They profess to show him how, if he is a grocer, he may become a sporting yachtsman; how, if he is a tenth-rate journalist, he may become a peer; and how, if he is a German Jew, he may become an Anglo-Saxon. This is a definite and business-like proposal, and I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back. Nobody would dare to publish a book about electricity which literally told one nothing about electricity; no one would dare publish an article on botany which showed that the writer did not know which end of a plant grew in the earth. Yet our modern world is full of books about Success and successful people which literally contain no kind of idea, and scarcely any kind of verbal sense.
Chesterton continues:
It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards. You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist. But you cannot want a book about Success. Especially you cannot want a book about Success such as those which you can now find scattered by the hundred about the book-market. You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners.