Scott
Winship, Brookings Institution. Follow him on Twitter: @swinshi
Income inequality remains remarkably prominent in political
and policy debates nearly four-and-a-half years since the start of the Great
Recession and less than six months from the consequential 2012 elections. To flesh out this otherwise trite
observation, consider what Lexis Nexus says about how often "inequality" has
appeared in the national paper of record, The
New York Times. During the three
years from September 2008 -- when the collapse of Lehman Brothers ushered in the
financial crisis -- through August 2011, the Times
published one inequality piece every 1.8 days.
I wouldn't read too much into
this number. I suspect that a more-careful analysis that honed in on prominent
articles and columns that were clearly about economic inequality would produce
a significantly smaller estimate.
The important thing here is the trend. Before the financial crisis, from the start
of 2001 through August of 2008, the Times
published an article including "inequality" once every 2.1 days, up from once
every 3.2 days during the 1990s and once every 4.8 days over the 1980s. In other words, inequality became an
increasingly visible topic in the Times
over the long run, a rise that mirrored the increase in inequality over this
period.
Beginning in September of last year, however, when Occupy
Wall Street penetrated into the public consciousness and when President Obama
began adopting a more populist and combative rhetoric and politics, inequality has
been a constant presence in the news.
From September of last year through last week, the Times included pieces on inequality not once every 1.8 days or even
once per day, but 1.5 times per day. If one includes the Times's blogs, that figure goes up to 2.9 times per day. Again, these levels probably overstate how
much the Times has run prominent articles
on inequality, but since last September, it has published nearly one article or
blog post every three days mentioning "inequality" at least five times.*
I'll spend some of my time in my stint as guest blogger the
next couple of weeks exploring the topic of inequality--what to make of the
basic trends and whether they should generate as much attention and concern as they currently
do. I'll also focus on trends in other
economic indicators, drawing from analyses I've been doing for the past six
years. It was around that time that I
was inspired by the work of Jacob Hacker (in ways he surely didn't intend) and
of Steve Rose (whose
book you should buy) to start looking more deeply into the numbers that are
waged as weapons of convenience in daily political debates. These debates generally proceed from
worldviews to the selective embrace and citation of evidence that reinforces
them. I have to fight off confirmation
bias just like everyone else, but I'll try to at least tell you what the
alternate arguments are and why I disagree with them.
If you think that economic problems are generally overstated,
as I do, you pretty quickly get labeled a conservative. Ideology isn't a terrible thing in and of
itself -- moral values related to freedom, equality, fairness, and justice do tend
to cluster together in coherent ways that differentiate liberals and
conservatives. I worry more about
government inefficiency and unintended consequences and less about market
failure compared with most liberals, but my views on justice and inequalities
of opportunity align more closely with liberals than with conservatives.
But my values and yours should be irrelevant when it comes
to establishing what the available data says.
It's unfair to peg people ideologically based on their read of
evidence. There's better and worse
evidence, but we have to do the work of assessing evidence, not make ideological
judgments based on the conclusions of this or that commentator. (For those without the time or background to
assess empirical claims, a good indicator of seriousness is the extent to which
someone addresses the evidence behind counterarguments rather than casting
aspersion on the service to which counterarguments are being put.)
What the ideally collected and measured data would say is
more contentious and leaves more room for bias to creep in, but it is not
difficult to find and assess the evidence cited by people with whom one
disagrees. It is reasonable to categorize people ideologically when they won't do this, won't change their views, and won't rigorously explain why they won't. But pegging people simply based on their
conclusions says at least as much about the ideology of the person doing the
pegging than about the person doing the concluding.
*Times-haters and stats sticklers: I know, I may be saying more about how much the Times cares about inequality than how much a representative sample of newspapers does. This is just a quick-and-dirty for illustration of the broader point that inequality is much newsier than it has been in the past. If the Wall St. Journal cooperated with Lexis Nexus, I'd have looked at the figures for them too. If someone else wants to fight with Factiva, I'd be curious to see the results.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/inequality-is-our-hottest-economic-trend-an-overrated-problem/256855/
