Looking at issues such as mobility, fairness, and inequality, I’ve recently shared excellent videos from Russ Roberts and John Stossel.
I also had an opportunity to discuss these issues yesterday on CNBC.
As you can see, I started with a political observation about the American people being naturally inclined to support growth and upward mobility, which suggests limited appeal for the spiteful agenda of Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the class-warfare crowd.
I hope I’m right about that, and a quick online search found this bit of somewhat-encouraging polling data from 2014.
Since I’m a bit of a bleeding-heart libertarian, I then took the opportunity to condemn various forms of cronyism (such as the corrupt TARP bailout) that transfer unearned money into the pockets of undeserving rich people.
I suggested that honest people from across the ideological spectrum could – and should – come together to curtail such nauseating policies. That’s the kind of fairness government should promote.
Though I’ll confess I’m not very hopeful. I concluded the discussion by observing that Senator Sanders recently chose to sacrifice the interests of poor children in order to curry favor with the union bosses at the National Education Association.
P.S. As indicated by his question about the desirability of millionaires, the host (Robert Frank) seemed sympathetic to good policy. He also was sufficiently well informed to know about how China’s partial liberalization has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty.
Many students from Harvard Class of 1989 were in the lowest income group back then. Would it be a worthwhile exercise in income inequality to compare that class’ income then to Harvard Class of 2019 now?
All good points, but the main issue is that those statistics ignore what happens to individuals over their lifetime.
If you take the individuals from thirty years ago and see how they’re doing now, the numbers are quite different.
Bezos might have been in the lowest group thirty years ago.
What they are doing with those statistics is taking the lowest income group from thirty years ago and measuring that against people in the lowest income group now. Students earned next to nothing then and they earn next to nothing now. Is that some sort of a problem? Earning years are in their future.
Those in the lowest group then were expected to learn English. Some in the lowest group now have never bothered to learn English. Will they learn? Maybe, but they are in the bottom group now for a reason.