Saturday, November 19, 2011

Income Inequality

I saw an interesting tweet the other day, I forget by whom.  The tweet was short and to the point (not surprising).  Since I don't recall the exact words, I'll paraphrase: protesting against income INequality, or lamenting income INequality is somewhat strange since it supposes that there could ever be such a thing as income EQuality.

Could a world actually exist with pure income equality?  In other words, all income must be redistributed to others until their income is equal to yours? 

Is focusing on the concept of income equality even productive?  Would we be better off focusing on providing equal incentives for saving, investment, further income generation, equal across the entire range of income?  I think so.

Thursday, November 03, 2011

Occupy Wall Street Rolls Up (or out of) Into Greg Mankiw's Class at Harvard

The author of your textbook (for my current Macro students) is dealing with Occupy Wall Street.  See his reasonable reaction here.  Interestingly, a former student comes to the classes' defense here.