America's Growing Inequality: Causes and Remedies
September 2018
Joseph Stiglitz
Growth in inequality
There has been an enormous increase in inequality over past third of a century
https://web.archive.org/web/20181013114759/https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/sites/jstiglitz/files/Utah%20September%202018%20FINAL.pdf
BeckyDem
(8,361 posts)The United States ranks last among G7 countries in our new inequality index.
Youve heard it before: The 42 richest people own as much wealth as half of humanity. Oxfam has been drawing attention to the global inequality crisis with that gut-wrenching data point. But isnt extreme economic inequality inevitable? If not, what can be done about it?
Quite a bit. Oxfam and Development Finance International launched the Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index this week at the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. This index ranks 157 countries according to how well their governments fight inequality through public spending on health, education and social protection, tax policy, and protection of labor rights.
Like Transparency Internationals perception of corruption index, we hope the index will encourage a race to the top among governments. The index shows that all countries have room to improve their policies against inequalityeven Denmark, which ranks first and trades on past glories, but is now backsliding. While rich countries tend to do better, not all do, like Singapore. Some poor countries do better than others, like Namibia, which achieves a decent score despite very a high level of income inequality. Some countries do well in one policy areaMozambique on tax policy, for exampleand less well in others.
The United States achieves a mediocre score and ranks 23rd in the world and last among G7 countries. The United States ranks at the top for public spending on health care as a proportion of total government spending, but millions of people lack health insurance and experience poor health outcomes. Spending on education is also relatively high, but unevenly distributed. Spending on social protection is low relative to other rich countries. The US labor rights score is very inadequate for a rich country, with a minimum wage below what is needed to keep working families above the poverty line and unchanged since 2009. The United States is one of only five countries in the world lacking mandatory paid parental leave. We expect the US score to fall in next years index as a result of the tax reform that came into force this year.
https://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/2018/10/how-are-governments-doing-in-their-efforts-to-fight-inequality/
Nobel laureate and Oxfam director on Trump's WEF speech
(26 Jan 2018) Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Oxfam Executive Director Winnie Byanyima criticised US President Donald Trump's address at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday. Stiglitz, a frequent Trump critic, was not sure "whether the pace of lies was greater or less than normal" but said "there were a lot of misstated facts" in Trump's speech. "For instance he said it's the fastest rate of jobs creation and in fact it is 20 percent lower than in the final years of the Obama administration. He tries to give the impression that it's the fastest rate of growth that we've ever had not true. During the Clinton administration was much, much faster," Stiglitz said.