Australia’s top income earners are a lazy lot. The top 0.1% only ever had a rising income share under a Labor government in the 1980s. Even the top 1% had a pretty lean time until the 1990s.
Source: The World Wealth and Income Database.
Lazy Australian top 0.1% only increased their income under @AustralianLabour
09 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, industrial organisation, politics - Australia, poverty and inequality, survivor principle Tags: antimarket bias, entrepreneurial alertness, superstar wages, superstars, top 1%, top incomes
How to show that unions & income inequality are unrelated when attempting to show a link
22 Sep 2016 Leave a comment
in human capital, labour economics, labour supply, politics - USA, unions Tags: superstar wages, superstars, top 1%
Fight for $15 tried to show a link between unions and rising income inequality but all it managed to show that unions went into decline several decades before inequality started to rise.
Taxman – The Beatles
07 Sep 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, public economics Tags: superstar wages, taxation and labour supply, The Beatles
World Cup pay gap: Here’s why it’s justified
06 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, discrimination, gender, labour economics, sports economics Tags: gender wage gap, superstar wages
% Australian top incomes from wages, salaries and pensions since 1954
19 Jul 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, occupational choice, politics - Australia, poverty and inequality Tags: Australia, CEO pay, superstar wages, superstars, top 1%, top incomes
Australia has had a working rich for a long time now. Australian top income earners are top wage earners. They are athletes, celebrities, business executives and in the professions.
Source: The World Wealth and Income Database.
% US top incomes from wages, salaries and pensions, 1913 – 2015,
18 Jul 2016 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economic history, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, occupational choice, politics - USA, poverty and inequality, survivor principle Tags: CEO pay, entrepreneurial alertness, superstar wages, superstars, top 1%, top incomes
The rich in the USA long ago became a working rich; most top incomes are from wages and salaries.
Source: The World Wealth and Income Database.
The Economist Crony Capitalism Index
08 Jul 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, economics of bureaucracy, entrepreneurship, financial economics, growth disasters, growth miracles, industrial organisation, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking, survivor principle Tags: crony capitalism, superstar wages, superstars, top 1%
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Few of the top 50 billionaires inherited their wealth
01 Jun 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economic history, entrepreneurship, financial economics, human capital, labour economics, poverty and inequality, unions Tags: entrepreneurial alertness, inherited wealth, superstar wages, superstars, top 0.1%, top 1%
Of the 15 inheritance based billionaires, three are from the Walton family, two are the Koch brothers and another three are from the Mars family.
Source: The world’s top 50 billionaires: A demographic breakdown.
The decline and decline of the rentier class in the USA
24 May 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, entrepreneurship, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, politics - USA, poverty and inequality Tags: entrepreneurial alertness, superstar wages, superstars, top 1%, top incomes
Looks like the Reagan Revolution coincided with the American rich going out to work for a living. They started earning most of their incomes from wages, salaries and pensions or from entrepreneurial income. The American rich are now working rich; top wage earners, not top income earners.
Source: The World Wealth and Income Database.
% of top incomes from wages, salaries and pensions
23 May 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economic history, entrepreneurship, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, poverty and inequality, survivor principle Tags: entrepreneurial alertness, envy, superstar wages, superstars, top 1%, top incomes
Everybody from the top 10% to the top 0.01% have to work for their living these days with much of their income coming from wages.
Source: The World Wealth and Income Database.
How much do you get paid if you can pick winners? @JulieAnneGenter @simonjbridges
05 May 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, entrepreneurship, fisheries economics, politics - New Zealand Tags: entrepreneurial alertness, hedge fund managers, industry policy, picking winners, superstar wages, superstars
Electric cars have joined the long list of mendicant mendicant businesses that have been backed by the New Zealand government of late. Picking winners again.
The payrolls of entire government departments in New Zealand are not enough to hire a single successful hedge fund manager to pick winners for their political masters. To get on the list of the top 25 hedge fund managers, you need to earn at least $300 million a year.
The 25 highest-earning hedge fund managers and traders made a combined $12 billion in 2015, slightly less than the $12.5 billion the 25 top-earning hedge fund managers together made in 2014.
Why do investment advisors sell and often give away their sage advice? If their insights were any good, they could trade on the share market before others caught on and make a killing!
I will give a personal example based on the skills of bureaucracies in picking winners. The test of my hypothesis is based on the transferability of human capital across jobs.
My graduate school professors in Japan included many retired bureaucrats from the Ministry of Finance and MITI. These agencies were heralded by Joe Stiglitz and others for picking winners and guiding Japanese companies to choose the right technologies and what to export.
The skills that my graduate school professors learned at picking winners over their careers with the Ministry of Finance and MITI in the high-growth years in the 1970s would now be available to them in their retirements to trade on their own account.
Page 32 of "An Illustrated Guide to Income" more economic #dataviz at: bit.ly/12SEI9p http://t.co/HYm0II2UNI—
Catherine Mulbrandon (@VisualEcon) May 08, 2013
My graduate school professors should quickly become very rich after retiring because of the skills they learned in picking winners while at the Ministry of Finance and MITI, which should cross over into their private share portfolios. The rich lists world-wide should be full of retired industry and finance ministry bureaucrats.
Instead, my graduate school professors took the train and bus to work and their families lived off their salaries in standard sized Japanese government apartments. All looked forward to their annual bonus of 5.15 months salary.
If governments are any good at picking winners, people should be willing to pay big time to get jobs at ministries of finance and ministries of international trade and industry to get access to their unique and highly secret skills they learn therein on how to pick winners.
I am still waiting for that tell-all book by an insider on these skills. Why is there no Picking Winners for Dummies on Amazon kindle as yet?
Creative destruction in top ICT company pay
05 May 2016 Leave a comment
in human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, survivor principle Tags: Apple, CEO pay, creative destruction, entrepreneurial alertness, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, superstar wages, superstars, top 1%, Twitter, Uber, Yahoo
I am surprised to see that Yahoo is in business much less competing for top talent. Microsoft is in decline too. Apple does not pay people as much as everybody else.
Source: Paysa Company Rank | Paysa.
Some other colours seem to duplicate so you will have to work out which is which by when they exploded in hiring top talent.
Was Occupy Wall Street based on a measurement error?
26 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economic history, entrepreneurship, human capital, labour economics, poverty and inequality Tags: entrepreneurial alertness, superstar wages, superstars, top 0.1%, top 1%
Piketty and Saez (2003, updated) estimated the share of income held by the top 1% from 13 percent in 1991 to 23 percent in 2012. The new Bricker et al. research shows only a 7 percentage point increase to 18 percent in 2012. The share held by the super-rich, the top 0.1% has increased much at all.
Source: Measuring income and wealth at the top using administrative and survey data via How super-rich Americans get that way is changing – AEI | Pethokoukis Blog » AEIdeas.
Source: Measuring income and wealth at the top using administrative and survey data via How super-rich Americans get that way is changing – AEI | Pethokoukis Blog » AEIdeas.
How did German, Italian, French, British and American billionaires make their money?
26 Feb 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, survivor principle Tags: billionaires, British economy, entrepreneurial alertness, France, Germany, Italy, superstar wages, superstars
@BernieSanders how did Danish, Swedish, Finnish & Norwegian billionaires make their money?
25 Feb 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, politics - USA, survivor principle Tags: 2016 presidential election, billionaires, Denmark, entrepreneurial alertness, Finland, inherited wealth, Norway, superstar wages, superstars, Sweden
OK, Nordic billionaire population sizes might be small, but plenty more billionaires make their own money in neoliberal USA than in Bernie Sanders’ Utopia
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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