U.S. income inequality worst since 1928

[The Brain]

But when we see tellers being replaced at banks

Did the mass roll out of ATMs result in a decrease or increase in the number of people employed by banks?

[Razgovory]

I always thought ATM had little bank tellers inside them.  Like Gnomes or Vietnamese or something.

[crazy canuck]

I always thought ATM had little bank tellers inside them.  Like Gnomes or Vietnamese or something.

Someone has to count the money before the machine spits it out.

[Eddie Teach]

I always thought ATM had little bank tellers inside them.  Like Gnomes or Vietnamese or something.

They tried it with Mexican tellers but that didn't work so well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh173tJRNX4

[jimmy olsen]

I really don't understand how the discussion about income inequality (and its growth) always seems to come down to redistribution.

The one has only a slight relationship to the other, and if growing income inequality is in fact a problem, the problem did not come about because there was less redistribution, nor can it be solved by more redistribution, at least not in any real and practical sense.

The rich are not taking more and more of a share of the nations wealth because they are not taxed enough. We could double their taxes, and the trend would continue.

The wealthy and their share of the tax burden is a separate issue. The fact that the rich are getting richer suggests that they can likely afford a greater tax burden, but that isn't the same thing.

Nations with a higher tax rate seem to have less income inequality. How are we so sure there's not a casual connection?

[Jacob]

Nations with a higher tax rate seem to have less income inequality. How are we so sure there's not a casual connection?

Generally the way it works is that if you want to argue that a correlation really indicates a causal connection, you offer some sort of evidence.

"Do we have any evidence that it's not?" does not constitute such evidence.

[Capetan Mihali]

[crazy canuck]

You are awarded 1 Crazy Canuck point of honour for the appropriate use of

[garbon]

But when we see tellers being replaced at banks

Did the mass roll out of ATMs result in a decrease or increase in the number of people employed by banks?

It did.

He asked an or question and your answer was essentially yes?

[crazy canuck]

But when we see tellers being replaced at banks

Did the mass roll out of ATMs result in a decrease or increase in the number of people employed by banks?

It did.

He asked an or question and your answer was essentially yes?

I assumed he was covering all the bases

[garbon]

The economist apparently did a piece on this. Answer, no and Obama was wrong to say it did.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/06/technology-and-unemployment

Though this was interesting.

I wouldn't blame ATMs on our jobless recovery, but surely the general skill-bias of technological change is an important part of the issue. I suspect Tyler Cowen may be right that the recession created an occasion for firms to shed "zero-marginal-product workers". In that case, the ranks of the unemployed are filled with wannabe workers whose labour is at present worth less to employers than the cost of employing them. This puts Mr Obama in a politically perilous position. We can expect rising aggregate demand to make it pay for some firms to once again employ some significant number of relatively low-productivity workers, but we probably can't reasonably expect the unemployment rate to return to its pre-recession level, at least not in the absence of politically unlikely employment subsidies or government make-work schemes.

[jimmy olsen]

Nations with a higher tax rate seem to have less income inequality. How are we so sure there's not a casual connection?

Generally the way it works is that if there if you want to argue that a correlation really indicates a causal connection, you offer some sort of evidence.

"Do we have any evidence that it's not?" does not constitute such evidence.

But I'm lazy.

[Ed Anger]

We know that.

[viper37]

it's not the distance between the top and the bottom that matters,

Imho, it's not that it doesn't matter, it's that in itself it tells us nothing.

Quebec doesn't have a huge gap between poor and rich.  To be in the top 1% earner, you need to make a little above 200k$/year.

Realistically, what can you do in Quebec with 200 000$/year?  Buy a nice house, afford a cottage, buy a nice car, have decent life insurance policies and that's about it.  Of course, you can send your kids to a private school, but anyone except the unemployed can do that in Quebec (private education is subsidized).  You can't afford to take vacations every year outside the country, you can't own properties outside of Quebec in very nice place, basically, nothing like Warren Buffet could do.

To know that you're in the upper 1% at 200 000$ and the lower 1% at 10 000$ that does not tell me what these poeple do.  Are you at 10 000$ because you can't find a decent job above that?  Are you there because you're mentally ill?  Are you there because you're an artist who doesn't want to earn more money and prefer living poor while doing your hobby full time?

That's why most of these stats are useless.

Imho, what's important, is how many generations it takes to go from the bottom to the upper echelons.  As it is in the US, it tends to increase.  That is alarming.  If poor people can't at least hope to stop being poor, it tends creates a bottom underclass and a top aristocracy, with all the priviledges that come with it.  In the past, an economic crisis could rebalance the thing, but nowadays, the government will always jump at the opportunity to help the rich survive the crisis they themselves provoked (1980s, 1990s, 2008 comes to mind, when the governments of the world saved their banks and their shareholders).

[Admiral Yi]

Imho, what's important, is how many generations it takes to go from the bottom to the upper echelons.

The problem with this measure of social mobility is it doesn't account for the distance between echelons in different countries.  I think a fairer measure of mobility is absolute change: what are the chances (or how long does it take) to move from your parents making 25K to you making 50K (or whatever).