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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (609)	6/9/2005 6:34:59 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541627

Its not just an issue of proving causality (although that is part of it), but even demonstrating what is actually happening (whether or not we can say why it happened). The income of the wealthiest has gone up more than the income of the less wealthy. In recent years the income at the bottom has been relatively stagnant. That is taken as a sign of decreased mobility but it isn't measuring mobility at all. To give an extreme hypothetical case, if all of the poorest 1% all the sudden had double the wealth of the current wealthiest 1%, while the richest 1% had their wealth changed to be half that of the current poorest 1%, income disparity would rise but there would be an extreme income/class/wealth mobility. To give a more realistic example - Illegal immigrants are more likely to be very poor than the average American. A group of immigrants to this country might gain wealth compared to what they had in their previous country but they might still make the poorest percentile poorer. The current poorest 1% might become wealthier but now they are the poorest 2% and they have less money then the previous poorest 2% had, and so on. Now if you look at the statistics, they show the richest 1% and 5% getting wealthier, and the poorest 1% and 5% getting poorer. But everyone is getting wealthier in this scenario, despite the statistical evidence that the poor are getting poorer. And of course people tend to accumulate wealth as they get older (at least until they retire) The poor are not the same people each year. To really see if the poor get poorer you would have to keep track of them over the years which isn't easy, except using a limited sample which would just be anecdotal evidence. Tim