The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.
The number of security guards in the United States has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than 1,000,000 in 2000 (Strom et al., 2010). These figures represent a steep increase from earlier years. In 1960, there were only about 250,000 guards, watchmen and doormen, according to the Census (which used a different occupational classification scheme than is used today). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of US security guards has increased by almost 100,000 since 2010, to a total of more than 1.1 million. As a measure of how paranoid and unwelcoming we are as a nation, security guards outnumber receptionists by more than 100,000 workers nationally.
Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev argue that we have become “one nation under guard” and say that the growth of guard labor is symptomatic of growing inequality. The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.
Economic inequality
The notion that negative gearing leads to an increased supply of rental dwellings is flawed: 92% of
investment is used to purchase existing dwellings, displacing previous owner-occupiers or tenants to
buy or rent elsewhere, respectively, resulting in little to no net increase in the rental stock. Negative
gearing is a poor investment strategy over the long term for investors pursuing capital gain rather
than rental income as housing prices have increased by an average of 2.4% annually from 1880 to
2011 in real terms (before 1996, housing had delivered a real return of only 0.7% annually). Negative
gearing for purposes of realizing capital gain, however, becomes a viable strategy during the boom
phase of a housing cycle as capital values are substantially appreciating. Contrary to claims that
quarantining negative gearing during 1985-87 caused a surge in rental prices, rents increased in only
some capital cities while stagnating or falling in others.[…]
It is recommended that, at a minimum, negative gearing be quarantined to the purchase of newly-
constructed dwellings, or preferably, be abolished. The Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) scheme
is better targeted towards those who require help in the course of renting rather than subsidising
residential property market investors. Although the CRA could increase rents, it appears to be the
most straight-forward mechanism available to policymakers to aid tenants.
The Australian Inequality Index is a ground-breaking new tool that provides a multidimensional measure of inequality across a range of economic, social, and demographic indicators. By tracking changes in inequality over time, we hope to enable a richer, more nuanced understanding of the root causes of inequality and develop targeted solutions to address them.
The over-reliance of economists and policy makers on traditional measures of progress, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Gross National Income (GNI), is understandable: it has been the dominant measure of economic progress for the better part of a century. Yet there is a shift afoot, with many policy thinkers and leaders now acknowledging its limitations as a tool to measure genuine social progress.
This shift can be seen in the rise of movements advocating the implementation of wellbeing budgets as a core part of government policy processes. That the Australian Federal Government has recently embraced the wellbeing framework underscores the utility and timeliness of our Index.
The Index provides seven conceptually sound, easy to follow sub-indices, and a composite index that brings these seven dimensions together. The sub-indices provide a useful set of insights into progress achieved within each of the chosen dimensions: income, wealth, gender, generation, ethnicity, disability and First Nations.
ACOSS (the Australian Council of Social Service) has partnered with UNSW Sydney to undertake a research and impact collaboration to sharpen the national focus on poverty and inequality in Australia. The partnership monitors trends in poverty and inequality over time, explores drivers, and develops solutions to sharpen the focus and stimulate action to tackle these policy challenges.
The World Income Inequality Database (WIID) presents information on income inequality for most countries and historical entities. It provides the most comprehensive set of income inequality statistics available and can be downloaded for free. ​
This page hosts the latest version of WIID, but also the WIID Companion datasets which report standardized WIID data to create more comparable country level inequality series, inequality indices, and complete country and global income distributions for the longest periods possible. The WIID Companion datasets are directly accessible in real time through our WIID Explorer, a powerful tool for accessing and analysing the most comprehensive collection of comparable income inequality statistics in the world.
The World Inequality Database (WID) aims to provide open and convenient access to the most extensive available database on the historical evolution of the world distribution of income and wealth, both within countries and between countries.
This year’s edition of the annual Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report finds that the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100,” blew $522 billion over the past five years on stock buybacks. Nearly half of these companies spent more on this once-illegal financial maneuver than they spent on capital investment vital to long-term competitiveness.
Why the fixation on buybacks? This is a CEO pay-inflating financial scam, pure and simple. When companies repurchase their own shares, they artificially boost share prices and the value of the stock-based compensation that makes up about 80 percent of CEO pay. An SEC investigation confirmed that CEOs regularly time the sale of their personal stock holdings to cash in on the price surge that typically follows a buyback announcement.
An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor—other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.
Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.
At first blush, these tycoons might seem to be “prepping” for a familiar 20th-century style apocalypse, as depicted in countless disaster movies. But they’re not.
Yes, their vast estates do include bunkers and other technologies traditionally associated with prepping. For example, the mansions of Ko’olau Ranch are connected through underground tunnels that feed into a large shelter.
However, Zuckerberg, Winfrey, Ellison and others are actually embarking on far more ambitious projects. They are seeking to create entirely self-sustaining ecosystems, in which land, agriculture, the built environment and labour are all controlled and managed by a single person, who has more in common with a mediaeval-era feudal lord than a 21st-century capitalist.
[…]
What we see with Zuckerberg’s project isn’t an overt conflict between billionaire and community. In Kauai, members of a community have consented, or conceded, to grant a plutocrat the stewardship of their land, in the name of preservation. This is a business model that leads directly (back) to feudalism.
This insight is lost in the media’s obsession with the “craziest features” of Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian folly. Rather, what is emerging among billionaires is a belief that survival depends not (only) on hiding out in a reinforced concrete hole in the ground, but (also) on developing, and controlling, an ecosystem of one’s own.
Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less well than we thought. Recent macroeconomic events, admittedly unusual, have seen quarrelling experts whose main point of agreement is the incorrectness of others. Economics Nobel Prize winners have been known to denounce each other’s work at the ceremonies in Stockholm, much to the consternation of those laureates in the sciences who believe that prizes are given for getting things right.
Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century. I will come to some of the substantive topics, but I start with some general failings. I do not include the corruption allegations that have become common in some debates. Even so, economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly be accused of having a vested interest in capitalism as it currently operates. I should also say that I am writing about a (perhaps nebulous) mainstream, and that there are many nonmainstream economists.