Eduardo Porter on me on inequality

He has a very good column on this topic today, here is one excerpt:

“The returns to growth are going to people in other countries, most notably China, and generally to people with high I.Q., no matter where they live,” said Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University and a contributor to the Economic View column in The New York Times. “I don’t really know how you could undermine this dynamic, short of wrecking the world. Trying to deny that logic is going to fail or worse, backfire.”

Mr. Cowen, who describes himself as a libertarian with a lowercase “l,” is the author of “Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation,” (Dutton, 2013), which posits that technology and globalization have essentially split the labor market in two: high and low earners. Far fewer stable jobs are left over in the middle to support what through much of the 20th century we called the middle class.

In his view, the defining challenge of our era is that workers in the bottom half of the distribution can no longer trust that their living standard will double every generation. “The right moral question is ‘are poor people rising to a higher standard of living?’ Inequality itself is the wrong thing to look at,” he told me. The real problem is slow growth.

“The best way to address rising inequality is to focus on increasing educational attainment,” Professor Mankiw said. Mr. Cowen adds other potentially useful policies, like expanding the earned-income tax credit or using urban policy to, say, make it easier for people who are not rich to live in San Francisco.

The full story is here, interesting throughout.

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