On 9/5/2013 3:12 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 5 Sep 2013 14:41:17 -0700 (PDT), "
wrote:

On Thursday, September 5, 2013 4:26:08 PM UTC-4, Ed Huntress wrote


And his other stupid example is Albania, which has 1/8 the per-capita

income of the USA.



Ed Huntress

You assert that Albania is a stupid example, but do not give any reason why other than that their per capita income is much lower than that of the United States. WHy do you think that is relevant? It seems to me that if an uneven distribution of income is good or bad , it would be true regardless of what the per capita income is. Sounds as if you want to cherry pick what is relevant.

Dan

Over 50% of Albania's employment is in agriculture -- small family
farms. Foreign investment and domestic investment are very low.

The dynamics of Albania's economy have virtually no relationship to
that of the United States.

If you read Birnbaum's blog post, which is what I'm referring to, the
false dichotomy that he made was between living in the USA or living
with a GINI coefficient of 0.27 -- Albania's.

But he made no effort to show any causative relationship. So it's a
silly example.

It's not a silly example, you ****wit. It proves the entire point:
*MOST* of the strident shrieking about "income inequality" - for
example, *ALL* of the shrieking about it by the Occutards - has as its
basis a belief that the inequality is "unfair" or "immoral" or in some
other way "bad" in and of itself. And even the more serious scholarship
on the topic has not identified even a *potential* causative link
between income inequality and lowered growth. Only some degree of
correlation has been found, and the direction of causation might just as
plausibly be in the other direction - the lowered growth in an economy
that otherwise would grow is what causes the income inequality. In
fact, this is a much more plausible explanation.

The Occutard shriekers - your side - aren't concerned about growth in
the least. They're just angry and bitchy that they don't have as much
as they think they "ought" to have. They think the inequality is bad
/per se/, and that's the only thing they're saying. They're wrong.

Birnbaum's point, and it's an excellent one because the debate is
dominated by the Occutard shriekers rather than the scholars, is that
simply looking at Gini coefficients - either their absolute levels or
changes in them - tells you nothing meaningful. But the shriekers, and
you, think they do. You're wrong - as usual.