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Despite generous social programs such as free pre-K education, free college, and massive transfer payments, Denmark is similar to the US in ...

If you have the slightest pretension to expertise concerning social mobility, meritocracy, inequality, genetics, psychology, economics, educ...

   London Review of Books (LRB) lecture: The history of American power, as it is commonly written, is a weighty subject, a matter of milita...

Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism....

The figures below come from economist  Branko Milanovic . He is the author of Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization...

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page Each of four ...

These numbers are derived from aggregate W-2 incomes for 158 million working Americans (see link for full table). The "raw" ave...

Nick Lemann reviews Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam. At the descriptive level, Putnam's conclusions seem...

This graphic is from today's NYTimes: Why American Workers Without Much Education Are Being Hammered . Aside from the human capital...

The working paper below on multigenerational mobility arrives at smaller intergenerational correlations than Greg Clark obtained (e.g., 0...

Discussions at the meeting I just attended are off the record, so I have nothing to report. But I will link to some previous posts of relev...

This report using CBO  (Congressional Budget Office) data claims that income inequality did not widen during the Great Recession (table...

Piketty on EconTalk  (podcast) -- a lively discussion between Russ Roberts and guest Thomas Piketty. See earlier post here . Piketty: ....

Recent increases in wealth inequality mainly due to top 0.01%, not top 1%? See this article (The Atlantic) and also here . The meth...

One of the jarring figures in Piketty 's book Capital in the Twenty-first Century shows the population fraction over time that inher...

From Planet Money . See also US economic mobility data and Not (all) in our genes?

New York magazine on what people make in the Big Apple. Doctors, financiers, escorts, drivers, editors, cops, attorneys, etc. If the figures...

This novel reminds of recent dystopian movies and books such as Elysium, The Road,  Never Let Me Go  and Cloud Atlas . Our zeitgeist rec...

See also Credentialism and elite performance . NYTimes : ... A silver spoon is no longer a mark of elite status. Take the nation’s top 10 ...

NYTimes Dealbook interview with the Goldman elevator tweeter ( GSElevator ). Q. Why did you start this thing? A. Again, I wanted to amus...