HT: The U.S. Economy According to the White House in 10 Charts – Real Time Economics – WSJ.
The reversing gender gap
19 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, poverty and inequality, welfare reform Tags: gender wage, reversing gender gap, sex discrimination
Single parenthood in the USA by ethnicity
18 Mar 2015 1 Comment
in economics of love and marriage, gender, labour economics, occupational choice, poverty and inequality, welfare reform Tags: child poverty, economics of fertility, single parenthood, single parents
Down and out in America in 2005 – Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox
17 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, population economics, poverty and inequality Tags: living standards, poverty and inequality, The Great Enrichment
For decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has reported that over 30 million Americans were living in “poverty,” but the bureau’s definition of poverty differs widely from that held by most Americans.
In fact, other government surveys show that most of the persons whom the government defines as “in poverty” are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term. The overwhelming majority of the poor have air conditioning, cable TV, and a host of other modern amenities. They are well housed, have an adequate and reasonably steady supply of food, and have met their other basic needs, including medical care.
Some poor Americans do experience significant hardships, including temporary food shortages or inadequate housing, but these individuals are a minority within the overall poverty population.
Class war warrior @WJRosenbergCTU inadvertently refutes the case for the class struggle
17 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economic growth, economic history, labour economics, poverty and inequality, unions
Today in the Dominion Post, Bill Rosenberg, a trade union self-described economist, argued that the workers are not getting their fair share of productivity gains in New Zealand over the last 35 years:
I calculate that wages in the 60 per cent of the economy studied by the commission would have been 12 per cent higher on average by March 2011, if they had kept up with productivity since 1978.
He then rounded up the usual Twitter Left suspects:
The commission’s study is important in that it finds that a large part of the fall in the labour share of income in the 1990s was due to high unemployment created by the radical restructuring of the economy that began in the 1980s and the Employment Contracts Act passed in 1991. Australia underwent similar restructuring during the period, but its labour income share fell only slightly. Its labour market is underpinned with an award system and other protections.
12%! 12% is at all that the class struggle is about over a 35 year period in terms of wage losses and labour surplus extract by the greedy bosses?
Figure 1: Real equivalised median household income (before housing costs) by ethnicity, 1988 to 2013 ($2013)
Source: Bryan Perry, Household incomes in New Zealand: Trends in indicators of inequality and hardship 1982 to 2013. Ministry of Social Development (July 2014).
As shown in figure 1, between 1994 and 2010, real equivalised median New Zealand household income rose by 47%; for Māori, this rise was 68%; for Pasifika, the rise in real equivalised median household income was 77%. Obviously these losses from the change in shares of GDP are dwarfed by the general increases in living standards over the last 20 years.
As is common with every member of the Left over Left that I run into these days, such as Bill Rosenberg, their analysis has no gender analysis.
The Left over Left invariably fail to mention that New Zealand has the smallest gender wage gap of all the industrialised countries.
Over the last more than two decades in New Zealand, there has been sustained income growth spread across all of New Zealand society contrary to hopes and dreams of the Left over Left. Perry (2014) reviews the poverty and inequality data in New Zealand every year for the Ministry of Social Development. He concluded that:
Overall, there is no evidence of any sustained rise or fall in inequality in the last two decades. The level of household disposable income inequality in New Zealand is a little above the OECD median. The share of total income received by the top 1% of individuals is at the low end of the OECD rankings.
As for Rosenberg’s hypothesis that it’s all the fault of the Employment Contracts Act, that doesn’t stand up. Figure 2 shows that union membership has been in a long slow decline in New Zealand since the mid-1970s. This is been pretty much the pattern all round the world.
Figure 2: Union density, New Zealand, Australia, the UK and USA 1970-2013
Source: OECD Stats Extract
The much hated Employment Contracts Act 1991, much hated by the Left over Left, doesn’t really show up in the union density figures in figure 2. There is no sudden break in trend obvious in figure 2 in the early 1990s when the Employment Contract Act was passed.
Indeed, the passage of the Employment Contracts Act 1991 was followed by a 15 year economic boom in employment and economic growth, as shown in figure 3. This was after the lost decades of 1974 to 1992 when there was next to no growth in real GDP per New Zealander aged 15 to 64. The good old days when the Lost Decades for New Zealand.
Figure 3: Real GDP per New Zealander and Australian aged 15-64, converted to 2013 price level with updated 2005 EKS purchasing power parities, 1956-2013
Source: Computed from OECD Stat Extract and The Conference Board, Total Database, January 2014.
Things are so grim for the class struggle in New Zealand that the leader of the Labour Party has had to redefine the working class because it is withering away so rapidly because so many workers are joining the middle-class:
Andrew Little is looking to update Labour's definition of the 'working class': stuff.co.nz/national/polit… http://t.co/AQ9mJL7CQf—
NZ Stuff Politics (@NZStuffPolitics) November 30, 2014
Children in single-parent families have lower achievement on average than those in two-parent families
17 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of education, labour economics, poverty and inequality, welfare reform Tags: single parents
NZ is in the middle of the pack in reducing poverty rates through redistribution
16 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in income redistribution, labour economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, poverty and inequality, welfare reform Tags: child poverty, welfare state
The figure shows pre-transfer and post-transfer poverty rates among OECD countries (mostly the advanced economies). The former (pre-transfer) are the market-driven poverty rates, before the tax and transfer systems kick in.
Source: OECD, *Poverty thresholds: 50% of median income.
Educational disadvantage and single parenthood
15 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of education, economics of love and marriage, gender, poverty and inequality, welfare reform Tags: family demographics, single parents
Is poverty in America not having a cell phone, or not having a smart phone?
13 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, poverty and inequality, technological progress Tags: cell phones, creative destruction, iPhones, technological diffusion
Are Moms Less Likely Than Dads To Pay Child Support? | FiveThirtyEight
10 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of love and marriage, law and economics, poverty and inequality
In 2011, 32 percent of custodial fathers didn’t receive any of the child support that had been awarded to them, compared with 25.1 percent of custodial mothers. That’s a relatively small difference. And when you look at the other extreme (i.e., the percentage of parents who receive the full amount), the difference isn’t statistically significant at all: 43.6 percent of custodial mothers compared with 41.4 percent of fathers.
Then there’s the gray area in between paying nothing and paying everything. The most common amount of child support due to custodial mothers is $4,800 annually, of which $2,500 is typically received (52 percent). For custodial fathers, median annual child support is less — it’s $4,160 — and fathers receive 40 percent of the amount they’re due.
via Are Moms Less Likely Than Dads To Pay Child Support? | FiveThirtyEight.
Australian top 1% has dropped the ball in the class struggle
10 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economic growth, economic history, labour economics, liberalism, poverty and inequality, Rawls and Nozick Tags: class struggle, immiseration of the proletariat, Leftover Left, top 1%
How is the immiseration of the proletariat going to occur any time soon, and with it, the workers will rise up because they have nothing to lose but their chains, if the Australian top 1% doesn’t lift its game.
There is a serious lack of greed and expropriation of labour surplus by the top 1% in Australia. Their share of income has been falling for many decades and only increased in the last few years and then only slightly.
The top 1% is supposed to be grinding the working class down, and causing crisis after financial crisis but there’s hardly any of evidence of that in Australian income inequality data.
Child poverty in America using the Supplementary Poverty Measure of the Census Bureau
09 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, population economics, poverty and inequality, welfare reform Tags: child poverty, measurement of poverty
Measuring child poverty after tax and income transfers from the welfare state make a big difference to the measurement of poverty in the USA.
via What If We Had Measured Poverty Differently for the Past 50 Years? – CityLab.
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