Attached are three articles I’ve found useful in expanding my understanding of our income/wealth inequality topic.  Steven Rattner’s America in 2013_The Numbers [Rattner 123013]from late last year is a dismal numbers tour of  the winners and losers in the Great Recession.  In Inequality as the Norm, Eduardo Porter explores some of the structural (i.e., non-policy) reasons inequality is with us to stay, while our brief (1950-1970) dalliance with a middle-income middle America is the aberration, not the norm.  Porter adds another illuminating dimension to the question in the last article (Inequality_Global) describing the extraordinary effects of global trade in driving down inequality globally, if at significant cost to the middle class in the first world.

The overall messages for me are twofold.  First, inequality is the norm for important structural reasons that do not yield much at all to policy intervention (including many Porter omits to mention, like:  genetics; self-perpetuating family values that don’t value education . . . or don’t know how to; pre-disposal to chronic health and mental health conditions).  Second message:  the fact that policy intervention is of limited usefulness does not excuse our country’s abandoning its policy tools for cushioning the effects and offering other pathways to those who can take advantage of them.  In particular it does not excuse our turning our political life over increasingly to influence and speech amplified ten-thousandfold by money.

That’s my two cents.

Angus