Is Income Inequality Increasing? Only If You Don’t Count Health Benefits
Income inequality is not so much a problem as income opacity.
In the latest issue of Regulation magazine, editor Peter Van Doren reviews two recent studies that find income inequality is not increasing:
While it is true that the cash explicitly paid to employees has become more unequal over the last generation, the implication that labor markets are not working well and that government should alter labor market outcomes does not necessarily follow. A more benign explanation for the change in cash compensation over a generation is the dramatic increase in health insurance costs. Employers may be paying all their employees a more or less equivalent increase on a percentage basis, but for lower-paid workers much of that pay is not showing up in cash. Thus, if this view is correct, inequality in the cash component of compensation has increased while inequality in total compensation has not increased because the fixed costs of health insurance are a much larger percentage of the total compensation of lower-earnings workers…
If one analyzes data on only working-age individuals (age 25–61), inflation-adjusted real pre-tax, post-cash-transfer money income grew 1.9 percent and 10.5 percent respectively for the first (poorest) and 10th (richest) deciles from 1995 to 2008. But if one adds the value of health insurance, the first (poorest) decile grew 12.3 percent while the top decile grew 11.7 percent.
[T]he growth in compensation by earnings decile (from the 30th to the 99th) averages 35 percent [from 1999 to 2006], with 41 percent growth at the 30th percentile (workers earning $10–$14 an hour) and only 35.8 percent growth at the 99th percentile (workers earning $59–$80 an hour).
Because expenditures on health care are increasing so rapidly and because so much of the cost of health care is paid for by employers or government, discussions about rising inequality that only consider cash income provide a misleading view of trends in inequality. When health insurance expenditures are added to household cash income, the increases in inequality from 1995 to 2008 are completely offset.
In brief: government intervenes in labor and health care markets; advocates of those interventions use the resulting income opacity to argue that markets are defective.
Filed under: General; Health Care; Regulatory Studies; Tax and Budget Policy
The Economy Tanked but, Hey, Wealth Inequality Declined
I just read through a new report from the Federal Reserve, “Surveying the Aftermath of the Storm: Changes in Family Finances from 2007 to 2009,” on how the Great Recession of 2007–2009 impacted the balance sheets of American households. The short and unsurprising answer is: very negatively. The average net worth of U.S. households fell by nearly 20 percent between 2007 and 2009.
A less intuitive finding was that the more wealthy households took a bigger hit, not just in dollars but in percentage of wealth. As the survey put it, there were “progressively larger decreases at the higher percentiles” of net wealth.
The survey also found progressively larger declines in income during the recession. The higher a household’s income in 2007, the steeper the decline on average by 2009. As the survey put it:
On the whole, events of the 2007–09 period tended to have an equalizing effect on income, although most of the changes in income were relatively modest. All the measures of income change presented here suggest that income increased for families with income below the 2007 median and income fell for families with income near or above the 2007 median.
The reason for the decline in inequality during the downturn isn’t all that mysterious, I suppose. Households with higher net worth tend to have more invested in stocks and real estate, which both took a big hit. And, as the report explained, their income is more dependent on capital gains, and farm, business, and self-employment income, which all fluctuate more with the business cycle.
Still, it is kind of jarring to see that even during a recession, income rose for families in the lower half of the income spectrum and fell for those in the top half. The curse of “rising inequality” and the rich getting richer at the supposed expense of the poor was temporarily suspended from 2007 to 2009, but at the cost of the deepest downturn since the Great Depression.
If forced to choose between a deep recession and rising inequality, I would gladly accept the latter.
A Flat Tire for Low-Income Drivers?
Will the President raise taxes on new tires?
President Obama will need to decide any day now whether to impose tariffs on lower-end automobile tires imported from China. As my colleague Dan Ikenson has ably argued, the decision will tell us much about whether the president believes trade policy should serve the general interest of all Americans, or whether it is simply a political tool to satisfy key constituencies.
Neglected in the news coverage of the pending decision is the impact it could have on consumers. The imported tires targeted by this Section 421 case are of the cheaper variety, the kind that low-income Americans would buy to keep their cars on the road during a recession. If the president decides to impose tariffs, his union supporters will cheer, but “working families’ will find it more difficult to keep their cars running safely.
A central theme of my new Cato book, Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization, is that import competition is a working family’s best friend, especially imports from China. As I write in an excerpt published in today’s Washington Examiner,
Imports from China have delivered lower prices on goods that matter most to the poor, helping to offset other forces in our economy that tend to widen income inequality. …
Imposing steep tariffs on imports from China would, of course, hurt producers and workers in China, but it would also punish millions of American consumers through higher prices for shoes, clothing, toys, sporting goods, bicycles, TVs, radios, stereos, and personal and laptop computers.
We will see shortly if President Obama will punish low-income Americans who drive.
Economics Bloggers Weigh in on Income Inequality
The economics blogosphere has been buzzing about Will Wilkinson’s new paper on income inequality.
George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen discusses why social inequality has been falling for some time in the United States:
I agree with Will Wilkinson’s point that real social inequality has (mostly) been falling for some time in the United States. Today many an upper middle class person is plausibly happier than many a billionaire. Yet most self-made billionaires work very hard to get to that position, which creates a possible tension between cardinal and “observed choice” or “ordinal” metrics of welfare. Why work so hard for so little? Presumably many of these billionaires really want to “be there,” even if they are only marginally better off or in some cases worse off.
The Atlantic‘s Megan McArdle offers her initial thoughts, and promises more analysis soon:
I broadly agree with Will that consumption inequality, not income inequality, is what matters. If the rich have access to broad classes of goods that the poor can’t have, I find this worrying. On the other hand, if the problem is that Bill Gates has a really awesome 80 inch flat panel television, while the poor have to be content with a 32 inch CRT, well, I can’t say my heartstrings are plucked very tight by this injustice. So it’s important to know what the real differences are.
Ezra Klein parses some of Wilkinson’s arguments at WashingtonPost.com:
One of Will’s first arguments is that income inequality is not a good way to think about the issue. The real key is consumption inequality. It’s not, in other words, how much money people make, but how much stuff they buy. And “the weight of the evidence shows that the run-up in consumption inequality has been considerably less dramatic than the rise in income inequality.”
The Economist Free Exchange blog has mixed reactions to the study:
Inequality, in and of itself, is no bad thing, and inequality in America has co-existed right alongside significant improvements in welfare across the income spectrum—and contributed directly to them, in many cases. Redistribution for its own sake is bad policy, and as Mr Wilkinson notes, it’s often bad policy pursued to cover up for still more bad policy elsewhere. But America’s society is a very unequal one, by developed nation standards, and it’s not always clear that that inequality is justified or advantageous. And any good student of human behaviour can tell you that wealth will seek to protect wealth, and will often succeed.
Matt Yglesias from Think Progress has posted twice on Wilkinson’s study:
I’m not in agreement with the overall thrust of Will Wilkinson’s paper on inequality for the Cato Institute, but one point that I think is in the spirit of what he’s saying was brought to mind by a question at last night’s event. The way I would put the point is that it’s a mistake to think of the world as composed of, on the one hand, “economic issues” in which we worry about wealth or income inequality and then on the other hand, “social issues” in which we worry about racism or sexism. Progressives ought to be concerned with a general issue of justice and social inequality, of which gaps in money income or wealth may be part.
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