And you are here why?

via Interfluidity Wouldn’t it be odd to live in a country where, say, bankers individually acknowledge that their industry often behaves destructively, where insiders perceptively describe the conditions that create incentives for people to take bad risks or fleece “ muppets “, but continue to work in those places and do nothing about it? Wouldn’t it be odd to live in a country where doctors privately apologize for the way their services are “ priced “, but nevertheless take home their paychecks and pay AMA dues? Or in a country where economics instructors teach agency costs with case study of textbook pricing, during a course for which students were required to purchase a $180 textbook?  I don’t mean to criticize anyone in particular. (I used to be the economics instructor.) In all of these cases, there really isn’t anything any one individual can do to remedy the bad practices. Making a big issue of them would lead to useless excommunication. Instead we shrug ironically. In...

Most (all?) discussions about inequality in the USA end up getting side-tracked and/or derailed for one simple reason - most people are unaware of where they actually are on the scale.  Or, to put it differently Surveys reveal that the majority of people (no matter whether they are poor or rich) believe that their position is in the middle of the distribution of wealth and income. It seems likely that part of the reason for this is that we primarily know people in a similar economic situation as ourselves, and that we have a hard time imagining that others are significantly richer or poorer than ourselves.  To put it in chart form And now, to really hammer this home, Maximilian Kasy of Harvard's Econ Dept has put together the Wealthometer .  Plug in a few quick numbers, and see exactly how misinformed you  are!

Via Andrew Gelman and Avi Feller , we have the following chart showing the election results for four income groups (based on exit polls. Blanks indicate states that were not polled). I'll let Andrew and Avi explain the results above Lower-income voters consistently support the Democratic candidate in nearly every state. Upper-income voters, on the other hand, are more mixed in their political views: wealthy voters in Mississippi are strongly Republican while wealthy voters in Massachusetts are strongly Democratic. And now to the threatening part. Consider the following The median income in the US is $50K . Translation? Half the voters in the country are going to - overwhelmingly - support Democrats As inequality grows, the percentage of people in the >$100K will decrease. Translation? The number of people who might vote Republican will decrease   And that is a problem, and a significant one at that.  To quote Danny DeVito in " Other People's Money ", ...