{"id":42352,"date":"2020-06-02T01:00:09","date_gmt":"2020-06-02T05:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42352"},"modified":"2020-06-01T08:28:15","modified_gmt":"2020-06-01T12:28:15","slug":"qotd-economic-inequality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2020\/06\/02\/qotd-economic-inequality\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Economic inequality"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 0px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Economic inequality [&#8230;] is both highly moralized (right-thinking people agree it&#8217;s the root of all evil) and intellectually devilishly complex, far more than people acknowledge. For example, if &#8220;the bottom fifth&#8221; earns the same proportion of income in 1980 and 2010, it doesn&#8217;t mean anyone&#8217;s income stagnated: these &#8220;fifths&#8221; are different people, and they earn a fifth of different totals. Also, it&#8217;s not clear that inequality (as opposed to poverty) is a moral abomination, or that reducing it is progress. As Walter Scheidel argues in <em>The Great Leveler<\/em> (another superb book of 2017), the most effective ways of reducing inequality are epidemics, massive wars, violent revolutions and state collapse.<\/p>\n<p>Steven Pinker, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.the-tls.co.uk\/articles\/public\/twenty-questions-steven-pinker\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Twenty Questions with Steven Pinker&#8221;, <em>Times Literary Supplement<\/em><\/a>, 2018-02-18.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Economic inequality [&#8230;] is both highly moralized (right-thinking people agree it&#8217;s the root of all evil) and intellectually devilishly complex, far more than people acknowledge. For example, if &#8220;the bottom fifth&#8221; earns the same proportion of income in 1980 and 2010, it doesn&#8217;t mean anyone&#8217;s income stagnated: these &#8220;fifths&#8221; are different people, and they earn [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,41],"tags":[91,290],"class_list":["post-42352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-quotations","tag-poverty","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-b16","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42352"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57576,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42352\/revisions\/57576"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}