There are clashing views on the relationship between income inequality and growth. Some have pointed to at least some measure of inequality as a necessary outcome of the rewards to innovation and risk-taking. Others have argued that excessive income …
We posit that the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is mediated by the level of equality of opportunity, which we identify with intergenerational mobility. In economies characterized by intergenerational rigidities, an …
Before the global financial crisis, income inequality was relegated to the underworld of economics. The motives of those who studied it were impugned. According to Martin Feldstein, the former head of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, such people must have been motivated by envy. Robert Lucas, a Nobel prize winner, thought that “nothing [is] as poisonous” to sound economics as “to focus on questions of distribution.”
But amid bailouts, unemployment, and ever-fresh financial scandals among the top 1%, the issue of income inequality has seeped into the mainstream economics and become a legitimate subject of research.
This study of ordinary families and how they talk to their very young children is no ordinary study at all. Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to know why, despite best efforts in preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from low-income …