Tag Archives: Economic Mobility

Inequality and Inequality Propaganda

21 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by in Income Distribution, Inequality, Uncategorized

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I’m an “inequality skeptic”, first, with respect to its measurement and trends; and second, with respect to its consequences. Economic inequality in the U.S. has not increased over the past 60 years as often claimed. And some degree of ex post inequality, in and of itself, has no implication for real economic well-being at any point on the socioeconomic spectrum, the growls of class-warmongers aside. So I’m not just a skeptic. I’m telling you the inequality narrative is BS! The media has been far too eager to promote distorted metrics that suggest widening disparities and presumed injustice. Left-wing politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez pounce on these reports with opportunistic zeal, fueling the flames of class warfare among their sycophants.

Measurement

Comparisons of income groups and their gains over time have been plagued by a number of shortcomings. Jeff Jacoby reviews issues underlying the myth of a widening income gap. Today, the top 1% earns about the same share of income as in the early 1960s, according to a recent study by two government economists, Gerald Auten and David Splinter.

Jacoby recounts distortions in the standard measures of income inequality:

  • The comparisons do not account for tax burdens and redistributive government transfer payments, which level incomes considerably. As for tax burdens, the top 1% paid more taxes in 2018 than the bottom 90% combined.
  • The focus of inequality metrics is typically on households, the number of which has expanded drastically with declines in marriage rates, especially at lower income levels. Incomes, however, are more equal on a per capital basis.
  • The use of pension and retirement funds like IRAs and 401(k) plans has increased substantially over the years. The share of stock market value owned by retirement funds increased from just 4% in 1960 to more than 50% now. As Jacoby says, this has “democratized” gains in asset prices.
  • A change in the tax law in 1986 led to reporting of more small business income on individual returns, which exaggerated the growth of incomes at the high-end. That income had already been there.
  • People earn less when they are young and more as they reach later stages of their careers. That means they move up through the income distribution over time, yet the usual statistics seem to suggest that the income groups are static. Jacoby says:

“Contrary to progressive belief, America is not divided into rigid economic strata. The incomes of the wealthy often decline, while many taxpayers go from being poor at one point to not-poor at another. Research shows that more than one-tenth of Americans will make it all the way to the top 1 percent for at least one year during their working lives.”

Mark Perry recently discussed America’s record middle-class earnings, emphasizing some of the same subtletles listed above. A middle income class ($35k-$100k in constant dollars) has indeed shrunk over the past 50 years, but most of that decrease was replaced by growth in the high income strata (>$100k), and the lower income class (<$35k) shrank almost as much as the middle group in percentage terms.

Causes

What drives the inequality we actually observe, after eliminating the distortions mentioned above? The reflexive answer from the Left is capitalism, but capitalism fosters great social and economic mobility relative to authoritarian or socialist regimes. That a few get fabulously rich under capitalism is often a positive attribute. A friend of mine contends that most of the great fortunes made in recent history involve jobs for which the product or service produced is highly scalable. So, for example, on-line software and networks “scale” and have produced tremendous fortunes. Another way of saying this is that the marginal cost of serving additional customers is near zero. However, those fortunes are earned because consumers extract great value from these products or services: they benefit to an extent exceeding price. So while the modern software tycoon is enriched in a way that produces inequality in measured income, his customers are enriched in ways that aren’t reflected in inequality statistics.

Mutually beneficial trade creates income for parties on only one side of a given transaction, but a surplus is harvested on both sides. For example, an estimate of the consumer surplus earned in transactions with the Uber ride-sharing service in 2015 was $1.60 for every dollar of revenue earned by Uber! That came to a total of $18 billion of consumer surplus in 2015 from Uber alone. These benefits of free exchange are difficult to measure, and are understandably ignored by official statistics. They are real nevertheless, another reason to take those statistics, and inequality metrics, with a grain of salt.

Certain less lucrative jobs can also scale. For example, the work of a systems security manager at a bank produces benefits for all customers of the bank, and at very low marginal cost for new customers. Conversely, jobs that don’t scale can produce great wealth, such as the work of a highly-skilled surgeon. While technology might make him even more productive over time, the scalability of his efforts are clearly subject to limits. Yet the demand for his services and the limited supply of surgical skills leads to high income. Here again, both parties at the operating table make gains (if all goes well), but only one party earns income from the transaction. These examples demonstrate that standard metrics of economic inequality have severe shortcomings if the real objective is to measure differences in well-being. 

Economist Robert Samuelson asserts that “workaholics drive inequality“, citing a recent study by Edward E. Leamer and J. Rodrigo Fuentes that appeals to statistics on incomes and hours worked. They find the largest income gains have accrued to earners with high educational attainment. It stands to reason that higher degrees, and the longer hours worked by those who possess them, have generated relatively large income gains. Samuelson also cites the ability of these workers to harness technology. So far, so good: smart, hard-working students turn into smart, hard workers, and they produce a disproportionate share of value in the marketplace. That seems right and just. And consumers are enriched by those efforts. But Samuelson dwells on the negative. He subscribes to the Ludditical view that the gains from technology will accrue to the few:

“The Leamer-Fuentes study adds to our understanding by illuminating how these trends are already changing the way labor markets function. … The present trends, if continued, do not bode well for the future. If the labor force splits between well-paid workaholics and everyone else, there is bound to be a backlash — there already is — among people who feel they’re working hard but can’t find the results in their paychecks.“

That conclusion is insane in view of the income trends reviewed above, and as a matter of economic logic: large income gains might accrue to the technological avant guarde, but those individuals buy things, generating additional demand and income gains for other workers. And new technology diffuses over time, allowing broader swaths of the populace to capture value both in consumption and production. Does technology displace some workers? Of course, but it also creates new, previously unimagined opportunities. The history of technological progress gives lie to Samuelson’s perspective, but there will always be pundits to say “this time it’s different”, and it probably sounds heroic to their ears.

Consequences

The usual discussions of economic inequality in media and politics revolve around an egalitarian ideal, that somehow we should all be equal in an absolute and ex post sense. That view is ignorant and dangerous. People are not equal in terms of talent and their willingness to expend effort. In a free society, the most talented and motivated individuals will produce and capture more value. Attempts to make it otherwise can only interfere with freedoms and undermine social welfare across the spectrum. This post on the Declination blog, “The Myth of Equality“, is broader in its scope but makes the point definitively. It quotes the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

The poster, “Thales”, goes on to say:

“The context of this was within an implied legal framework of basic rights. All men have equal rights granted by God, and a government is unjust if it seeks to deprive a man of these God-given rights. … This level of equality is both the basis for a legal framework limiting the power of government, and a reference to the fact that we all have souls; that God may judge them. God, being omniscient, can be an absolute neutral arbiter of justice, having all the facts, and thus may treat us with absolute equality. No man could ever do this, though justice is often better served by man at least making a passing attempt at neutrality….”

Attempts to go beyond this concept of ex ante equality are doomed to failure. To accept that inequalities must always exist is to acknowledge reality, and it serves to protect rights and opportunities broadly. To do otherwise requires coercion, which is violent by definition. In any case, inequality is not as extreme as standard metrics would have us believe, and it has not grown more extreme.

Climbing Up: Economic Mobility In the U.S.

29 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Inequality, Markets, Redistribution

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One of the great sacred cows of current economic discourse is that U.S. living standards have been stagnant for decades, coincident with a severe lack of economic mobility (I know, those are goats!). These assertions have been made by people with the training to know better, and by members of the commentariat who certainly would not know better. But Russ Roberts has a great article on the proper measurement of these trends and how poorly that case stacks up. I have made some of the same points in the past (and here), but Roberts’ synthesis is excellent.

Those who insist that income growth has languished or even declined in real terms over the past 40 years have erred in several ways. They usually ignore non-wage benefits (for which workers often receive favorable tax treatment) and other forms of income. Roberts notes that income tax returns leave about 40% of income unreported, and a lot of it goes to individuals in lower income strata. In addition, the studies often use flawed inflation gauges, fail to adjust correctly for various demographic trends in the identification of “households”, and most importantly, fail to follow the same individuals over time. The practice of taking “snapshots” of the income distribution at two different points in time, and then comparing the same percentiles from those snapshots, is inappropriate for addressing the question of income mobility. Instead, the question is how specific individuals or cohorts have migrated across time. Generally incomes grow as people age through their working lives.

Roberts discusses some studies that follow individuals over time, rather than percentiles, to see how they have fared:

From a study comparing the 1960s and the early 2000s:

“… 84% earned more than their parents, corrected for inflation. But 93% of the children in the poorest households, the bottom 20% surpassed their parents. Only 70% of those raised in the top quintile exceeded their parent’s income.”

 In another study compared children born in 1980:

“… 70% of children born in 1980 into the bottom decile exceed their parents’ income in 2014. For those born in the top 10%, only 33% exceed their parents’ income.”

Another study finds:

“The children from the poorest families ended up twice as well-off as their parents when they became adults. The children from the poorest families had the largest absolute gains as well. Children raised in the top quintile did no better or worse than their parents once those children became adults.”

The next study cited by Roberts compares adults at two stages of life:

“The study looks at people who were 35–40 in 1987 and then looks at how they were doing 20 years later, when they are 55–60. The median income of the people in the top 20% in 1987 ended up 5% lower twenty years later. The people in the middle 20% ended up with median income that was 27% higher. And if you started in the bottom 20%, your income doubled. If you were in the top 1% in 1987, 20 years later, median income was 29% lower.”

And here’s one more:

“… when you follow the same people, the biggest gains go to the poorest people. The richest people in 1980 actually ended up poorer, on average, in 2014. Like the top 20%, the top 1% in 1980 were also poorer on average 34 years later in 2014.”

These studies show impressive mobility across the income distribution, but is it still true that overall incomes have been flat? No, for reasons mentioned earlier: growth in benefits and unreported income have been dramatic, and inflation measures used to “deflate” nominal income income gains are notoriously poor. When the prices of many goods are expressed in terms of labor hours, there is no doubt that living standards have advanced tremendously. It is all the more impressive in view of the quality improvements that have occurred over the years.

The purported income stagnation and lack of mobility are also said to be associated with an increasingly unequal distribution of income. The OECD reports that the distribution of income in the U.S. is relatively unequal compared to other large, developed countries, but the definitions and accuracy of these comparisons are not without controversy. A more accurate accounting for incomes after redistribution via taxes and transfer payments would place the U.S. in the middle of the pack. And while measures of income inequality have trended upward, consumption inequality has not, which suggests that the income comparisons may be distorted.

Contrary to the oft-repeated narrative, U.S. living standards have not stagnated since the 1970s, nor have U.S. households been plagued by a lack of economic mobility. It’s easy to understand the confusion suffered by journalists on these points, but it’s horrifying to realize that such mistaken interpretations of data are actually issued by economists. Even more disappointing is that these misguided narratives are favorite talking points of class warriors and redistributionists, whose policy recommendations would bring-on real stagnation and immobility. That’s the subject of a future post, or posts. For now, I’ll let it suffice to say that it is the best guarantee of mobility is the preservation of economic freedom and opportunity by limiting the size and scope of government, creating a more neutral tax code, and encouraging markets to flourish.

American Homicide Rates: Which America?

12 Thursday Oct 2017

Posted by in Discrimination, Gun Control, Immigration

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A heterogenious society and the successful assimilation of minorities are two very different things, as much as we might wish otherwise. Two populations within a region will come into contact, but conditions promoting real assimilation are complex. (I’m avoiding use of the term “diversity” because it has come to imply the successful assimilation of distinct groups.) While cultural differences can enrich the lives of both populations, sharp economic gaps between minority and majority populations (and even some cultural differences) will tend to slow the process of assimilation. This is often associated with social dysfunction, such as high crime and homicide rates, especially among the minority group. This is a fairly common phenomenon in countries with racial and ethnic minority or immigrant populations, as Ryan McMaken writes in a recent piece on international differences in heterogeneity and homicide rates.

Heterogeneity In the West

Countries in the Western Hemisphere tend to have relatively high immigrant and minority populations, as McMaken describes:

“… when considering the Americas, … nation-states are in most cases frontier states with populations heavily affected by immigration, a history of conflict with indigenous populations, and institutionalized chattel slavery that lasted until the 19th century. The factors are significant through the region, and the United States cannot be held apart in this regard from the Caribbean, Brazil, Colombia, and other states impacted by all these factors. 

Importantly, these factors also make the Americas significantly different from Western Europe and other areas — Japan and Korea, for example — where the present situation is marked by much higher levels of cultural uniformity and quite different recent histories and current demographic trends.“

Homicides

McMaken questions popular theories of cross-country differences in homicide rates based on the degree of gun control and gun ownership rates. Homicides and violent victimization have been declining in the U.S. for many years even as gun ownership has soared. Furthermore, international comparisons are traditionally plagued by arbitrary country classifications and exclusions, as well as inconsistent definitions of homocide and gun ownership. However, McMaken points to other explanations for violent crime found to be fairly robust in the academic literature: poverty and population heterogeneity:

“… these factors contribute to lower levels of social cohesion, and thus higher levels of criminality and other socially-undesirable behaviors.“

McMaken cites research involving ethnic minority populations of Slavs in Germany, Italians in Argentina and the U.S., and Arabs in Europe, all of whom had crime rates far exceeding those in their countries of origin. The connection between heterogeneity and crime might have nothing to do with particular ethnic groups, though it seems all too easy for observers within individual countries to blame specific “others” for crime. It is a symptom of alienation from the majority as well as economic desperation and vulnerability to opportunities and threats arising from the underground economy. Illegal activities might truly provide the best alternatives available to low-skilled, minority job seekers. Needless to say, underground economic activity, such as the drug trade, involves high risk and often violence among users and between competing factions. This is an important source of the high crime and victimization that typifies many minority communities.

Despite declines since the 1970s, the U.S. still has a higher homicide rate than many other industrialized countries. Beyond the weakness cited above, such comparisons fail to control for other confounding effects, including the degree of heterogeneity across countries.

Policies

Heterogeneity poses a problem in the context of involuntary and often voluntary segregation of sub-cultures. If you don’t believe the “voluntary” part, take a close look at the different clusters of individuals in the cafeteria at almost any “diverse” university or corporate office. Judge for yourself. Differences in language, fertility, demographics, religion and cultural traditions may be noteworthy, but where crime is associated with effectively segregated minorities, there is usually a gap in economic status and mobility relative to society at large.

What policies can mitigate these conditions and their impact on crime? It would be nice to approach this question strictly from the perspective that heterogeneity is a given, but the degree of heterogeneity is, to some extent, an endogenous outcome. Restrictive immigration policies might leap to mind as a way of restraining heterogeneity, and there is little doubt that illegal immigrants are less likely to assimilate (many contend that their crime rate is low). Policies allowing less restricted flows of legal immigrants tend to be salutary if they are based on domestic economic need, economic potential, or compassion for those seeking asylum or a haven from political oppression. A legal immigrant receiving a welcome on new shores is more likely to assimilate successfully than an illegal immigrant, all else equal. Citizenship and language education are avenues through which assimilation might be encouraged. And there could be ways to improve sponsorships and even temporary visa programs so as to encourage assimilation.

What can be done to encourage more effective assimilation of all minorities? And what can be done to reduce the crime associated with unassimilated populations? One major corrective is a strong economy. Policies that encourage economic growth will lead to greater participation in markets and society, with consequent interaction and mixing of sub-cultures. Growth policies include low and non-distortionary taxes and light regulation.

The war on drugs also accounts for a major share of homicides, and that war interacts with non-assimilation in perverse ways. It is crippling to disadvantaged communities precisely because it creates risky “opportunities” in the underground economy. It also produces high levels of incarceration and dangerous forms of “cut” contraband. As I’ll discuss in my next post, ending the war on drugs would reduce violent crime and lead to safer drugs in relatively short order.

A short list of other policies that would foster assimilation and economic mobility would include: improved education: school choice and apprenticeship programs; better labor market outcomes: reduce the minimum wage or create sub-minimum wage categories to enhance opportunities to gain experience and skills; better housing: eliminate rent controls.

Assimilation is always more effective when it occurs “organically”. Affirmative action and forced diversity initiatives often fail to achieve effective assimilation. Beyond the obvious infringement on liberty, these policies may sow resentment among those who suffer reverse discrimination, and among those who witness it, to the probable detriment of efforts to eliminate bias. Even worse, these policies often put their intended beneficiaries into vulnerable, un-winnable situations: jobs or programs for which their skills are not adequate. There are undoubtedly excellent candidates among those placed in positions under quotas, but there is a likelihood that many will be unsuccessful in their roles.

Conclusion

The anti-gun left is eager to attribute differences in homicide rates to the impact of gun control policies, but a close examination of the facts reveals better explanations. A prominent factor contributing to differences in homicide rates is the degree of heterogeneity across countries. Those with more homogeneous populations tend to have lower homicide rates and vice versa. But the problem is not merely heterogeneity, but the difficulty of economic and cultural assimilation of minority populations. These factors appear to lead to greater crime within many minority populations. The U.S. is not unique in its experience with high minority crime rates, but it is a relatively heterogenous nation. This is an important factor in explaining why the homicide rate tends to be higher in the U.S. than in other industrialized countries. To close, I’ll offer something cogent from Bretigne Shaffer’s On the Banks blog, in which she offers this quote from an individual named Michael Owen (the soccer player?):

“... we don’t really have a single America with a moderately high rate of gun deaths. Instead, we have two Americas, one of which has very high rates of gun ownership but very low murder rates, very comparable to the rest of the First World democracies such as those in western & northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, South Korea. The other America has much lower rates of gun ownership but much, much higher murder rates, akin to violent third world countries.“

Pawning Growth For Redistribution

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Equality, Redistribution

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govt here to help

The following is no mystery: if you want prosperity, steer clear of policies that inhibit production and physical investment. This too: if you want to lift people out of poverty and dependency, don’t promote policies that discourage hiring and work incentives. Yet those are exactly the implications of policies repeatedly advocated by so-called redistributionists. The ignorance flows, in large part, from a distraction, a mere byproduct of economic life that has no direct relation to economic welfare, but upon which followers of Bernie Sanders are absolutely transfixed: income and wealth inequality. Attempts to manipulate the degree of inequality via steeply progressive taxes, transfers and market intervention is a suckers game of short-termism. It ultimately reduces the value of the economy’s capital stock, chases away productive activity, destroys jobs, and leaves us all poorer.

Absolute income growth is a better goal, and encouraging production is the best way to raise incomes in the long-run. Unless envy is your thing, income inequality is largely irrelevant as a policy goal. In “Why and How We Care About Inequality“, John Cochrane emphasizes that inequality may be a symptom of other problems, or perhaps no problem at all. His point is that treating a symptom won’t fix the underlying problem:

“A segment of America is stuck in widespread single motherhood … terrible early-child experiences, awful education, substance abuse, and criminality. 70% of male black high school dropouts will end up in prison, hence essentially unemployable and poor marriage prospects. Less than half are even looking for legal work.

This is a social and economic disaster. And it has nothing to do with whether hedge fund managers fly private or commercial. It is immune to floods of Government cash, and, as Casey Mulligan reminded us, Government programs are arguably as much of the problem as the solution. So are drug laws….“

The writers of the center-left Third Way blog give some details on income growth that might disappoint some progressives. They agree that the emphasis on redistribution is misplaced. Solving economic problems requires a different approach:

“From 1980 to 2010, income gains (after taxes and government transfers are included) favored the wealthy but were still spread across all income brackets: a 53% increase for the bottom quintile; a 41% increase for the next two; a 49% increase for the 4th; and a 90% increase for the richest fifth. Thus, while income inequality may offend our sense of justice, its actual impact on the middle class may be small.

With a singular focus on income inequality, the left’s main solutions are greater re-distribution and a re-writing of the rules to ‘un-rig’ the system. But, however well motivated, some of the biggest ideas into which they are directing their energy do not remotely address the underlying ‘Kodak’ conundrum—how do Americans find their place in a rapidly changing world? In fact, some would actually make the task of increasing shared prosperity significantly harder.“

The hubbub over inequality and redistribution is fueled by misconceptions. One is that the rich face low tax burdens, often lower than the middle class, a mistaken notion that Alan D. Viard debunks using 2013 data from a report from the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO report accounts for double taxation of dividends and capital gains at the corporate level and at the personal level (though capital gains are taxed to individuals now, while the anticipated corporate income is taxed later). The CBO study also accounts for employers’ share of payroll taxes (because it reduces labor income) so as to avoid exaggerating the tax system’s progressivity. Before accounting for federal benefits, which offset the tax burden, the middle 20% of income earners paid an average tax rate of less than 15%, while “the 1%” paid more than 29%. However, after correcting for federal benefits, the middle quintile paid a negative average tax rate, while the top 1% still paid almost 29%. That is a steeply graduated impact.

Rising income inequality in the U.S. is more a matter of changes in household structure than in the distribution of rewards. This conclusion is based on the fact that income inequality has risen steadily over the past 50 years for households, but there has been no change in inequality across individuals. An increasing number of single-person households, primarily women over the age of 65, accounts for rising inequality at the household level. The greedy corporate CEOs of the “occupier” imagination are really not to blame for this trend, though I won’t defend corporate rent-seeking activities intended to insulate themselves from competition.

Measures of income inequality hide another important fact: one’s position in the income distribution is not static. Chelsea German notes that Americans have a high degree of economic mobility. According to a Cornell study, only 6% of individuals in the top 1% in a given year remain there in the following year. German adds that over half of income earners in the U.S. find themselves in the top 10% for at least one year of their working lives.

There are several reasons why redistributionist policies fail to meet objectives and instead reduce opportunities for the presumed beneficiaries to prosper. Dan Mitchell covers several of these issues, citing work on: the rational response of upper-income taxpayers to  punitive taxes; the insufficiency of funding an expanded welfare state by merely taxing “the rich”; the diversion of most anti-poverty funds to service providers (rather than directly to the poor); the meager valuation of benefits from recipients of Medicaid, and the fact that the program lacks any favorable impact on mortality and health measures. Mitchell features the “First Theorem of Government” in a sidebar:

“Above all else, the public sector is a racket for the enrichment of insiders, cronies, bureaucrats and interest groups.“

A few years back, the great Thomas Sowell explained “The Fallacy of Redistribution” thusly:

“You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.“

That future wealth can and should be enjoyed across the income spectrum, but punitive taxes destroy productive capital and jobs.

A great truth about poverty comes from Angela Ranchidi of the American Enterprise Institute: low wages are not at the root of poverty; it’s a lack of jobs. She quotes a Gallup report on this point, relative to the working-age poor in 2014:

“Census data show that, 61.7% did not work at all and another 26.6% worked less than full-time for the entire year. Only 11.7% of poor working-age adults worked full-time for the entire year in 2014. Low wages are not the primary cause of poverty; low work rates are. And if Gallup is correct, the full-time work rate may already be peaking.“

More than 88.3% of the working-age poor were either unemployed or underemployed! And here’s the kicker: redistributionists clamor for policies that would place an even higher floor on wage rates, yet the floor already in place has succeeded in compromising the ability of low-skilled workers to find full-time work.

Cochrane sums up the inequality debate by noting the obvious political motives of progressive redistributionists:

“Finally, why is “inequality” so strongly on the political agenda right now? Here I am not referring to academics. … All of economics has been studying various poverty traps for a generation…. 

[The] answer seems pretty clear. Because [the politicians and pundits] don’t want to talk about Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, bailouts, debt, the stimulus, the rotten cronyism of energy policy, denial of education to poor and minorities, the abject failure of their policies to help poor and middle class people, and especially sclerotic growth. Restarting a centuries-old fight about “inequality” and “tax the rich,” class envy resurrected from a Huey Long speech in the 1930s, is like throwing a puppy into a third grade math class that isn’t going well. You know you will make it to the bell.

That observation, together with the obvious incoherence of ideas the political inequality writers bring us leads me to a happy thought that this too will pass, and once a new set of talking points emerges we can go on to something else.“

Economic Mobility Is Alive and Well

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

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The widespread belief that the U.S. is mired in an era of reduced economic mobility is a myth. Some prominent research cited at the link says as much. There are several kinds of mobility, of course — cultural mobility, social mobility, physical mobility, and they all bear relationships to economic mobility in one way or another. The article points out that physical mobility has increased dramatically, yet today it is less important than ever in the sense that we can accomplish so much from the comfort of a living room couch. “Today, most Americans have access to resources that were once inconceivable, and that access lets us cover more cultural and social ground than humans had ever previously been able to manage.” 

I always enjoy discussions of the inadequacies of economic yardsticks (the author mistakenly refers to such measures as “econometrics”), especially measures of output like GDP. The article uses a little humor to illustrate some of these measurement problems (e.g., “What’s the value of being able to track Alec Baldwin’s meltdowns in real-time?”), but the measurement problems contribute to the fallacy of immobility.

“… in the midst of all these developments, our reigning preoccupation is a false narrative about dwindling economic mobility. Apparently the breakthroughs and benefits accrue in such dizzying but routine fashion now that even our most fervent potentates of hope and change have trouble keeping track of our progress.”