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2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Mr. Sanders peddles fiction on free trade [View all]polly7
(20,582 posts)100. Hard to believe anyone here supports outsourcing hundreds of thousands of
jobs that once supported a middle-class just to enrich those who don't worry for one second about all those they've plunged into poverty.
Growing Apart
A Political History of American Inequality
Colin Gordon, Author
Introduction
Americans today live in a starkly unequal society. Inequality is greater now than it has been at any time in the last century, and the gaps in wages, income, and wealth are wider here than they are in any other democratic and developed economy.
The dimensions of that inequality are fully described and explained in the pages that follow. The graphics below offer a summary overview. The first distills the basic findings (for the U.S.) of Thomas Piketty's magisterial Capital in the Twenty-First Century: the now-familiar suspension bridge of income inequality, dampened only by the exceptional economic and political circumstances of the decades surrounding World War II; the growing share of recent income gains going to the very high earners (the 1% or .01%); the stark inequality within labor income (see the top 1% and top 10% wage shares) generated by the emergence of lavishly-compensated supermanagers; and a concentration of wealth that fell little over the first half of the twentieth century and has grown steadily since then.
The dimensions of that inequality are fully described and explained in the pages that follow. The graphics below offer a summary overview. The first distills the basic findings (for the U.S.) of Thomas Piketty's magisterial Capital in the Twenty-First Century: the now-familiar suspension bridge of income inequality, dampened only by the exceptional economic and political circumstances of the decades surrounding World War II; the growing share of recent income gains going to the very high earners (the 1% or .01%); the stark inequality within labor income (see the top 1% and top 10% wage shares) generated by the emergence of lavishly-compensated supermanagers; and a concentration of wealth that fell little over the first half of the twentieth century and has grown steadily since then.
The second graphic (below) zeros in on inequality measures and metrics since the end of the Second World War, highlighting the sharp break in the late 1970s. The basic pattern is not hard to discern: against a backdrop of fairly steady economic growth (the grey bars show gross domestic product in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars), the richest Americans have raced ahead. Working Americans and their families, by contrast, are either treading water or slowly sinking (for an indexed version of the same graphic, allowing comparison across measures).
The dimensions of that inequality are both familiar and depressing. A smaller share of national income is flowing to wages and earnings, andmore importantinequality within that labor share is widening. As a result, wage growth has flatlined for a generation [see graphic below]. Middle-income workers make no more now than they did in the late 1970s; those in the lower wage cohort have lost ground over that span. The current inequality of labor income in the United States, as Thomas Piketty concludes, "is probably higher than than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world, including societies in which skill disparities were extremely large."
On each of these fronts, inequality has grown more in the United States than it has elsewhere. Nowhere in the industrialized world is there a bigger gap between wage growth and productivity growth over the last two business cycles. Over the last twenty years, the richest Americans started with a bigger share of income than any of their well-heeled peers and gained more than any of them. Among the worlds wealthy countries (those with an average adult wealth of $100,000 or more), the U.S. ranks dead last on the relevant inequality measures. The graphics below plots the gini index measure of inequality for 2000 and 2010 for the United States and its OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) peers. By this measure, the United States is second only to Portugal in 2000, and--its inequality growing at a faster rate than that of any of is peers, an unqualified number one by 2010.
(Interactive graphs).
http://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of-american-inequality/index
http://inequality.org/
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People complain I use personal experience, but my experience in corporate America
hollysmom
Mar 2016
#1
You can't look at one industry to gauge the impact of trade. Many Mexican farmers have jobs
Hoyt
Mar 2016
#60
When Mexico wises up, it will be better to have economic activity to tax and jobs to require
Hoyt
Mar 2016
#113
I see you have a Buddha avatar. Nice compassionate attitude you have there.
liberal_at_heart
Mar 2016
#13
Yeah it arguably affects cities worse because when the economy is gone then
Cheese Sandwich
Mar 2016
#94
We make most of the heavy plant and machinery other countries use in their factories
Recursion
Mar 2016
#91
The millions of people who lost their jobs know the truth. You are going on my ignore list.
liberal_at_heart
Mar 2016
#20
Tell that to the people who used to work at the 10 - 12 factories that used to exist nearby.
Vinca
Mar 2016
#10
The problem is every time a factory closes people say "NAFTA". Even if it went to China
Recursion
Mar 2016
#68
Don't believe that's true, but it would be less than one percent of jobs if it were.
Hoyt
Mar 2016
#61
Not surprising that you failed to point out that household/consumer debt has exponentially increased
brentspeak
Mar 2016
#107
"NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics, Uh huh.
cherokeeprogressive
Mar 2016
#37
Personal experience is very meaningful. Similar things happened every where.
Bread and Circus
Mar 2016
#42
Somewhere there must be a thorough analysis of the number of jobs shipped elsewhere
Jitter65
Mar 2016
#115
It is moving there in an attempt to survive against cheaper/better products made elsewhere. It's sad
Hoyt
Mar 2016
#62
People want high quality, inexpensive stuff. Carrier, Toyota, Samsung, etc., are proof of that.
Hoyt
Mar 2016
#66
In the context of about 50 million net new jobs having been created since then
Recursion
Mar 2016
#78
The data are very clear: the last 20 years were much better than the 20 years before them
Recursion
Mar 2016
#74
TPP is in the Democratic Party Platform for a reason. Anti-NAFTA spin is pushed hard by the RW
ucrdem
Mar 2016
#97
Nope. Sept 26, 1960: "I'm not satisfied until every American enjoys full constitutional rights.
ucrdem
Mar 2016
#104
And then he left the Freedom Riders totally unprotected against the white mobs.
Ken Burch
Mar 2016
#105