Re: EOpriv: OWNERSHIP: Aggregates and Ownership

[John Médaille <john@medaille.com>]

At 03:40 PM 9/26/2002 -0500, Karen May wrote:



>Please let me know what you think of these sources--I very much
>appreciate the spirit of your question.

The Santa Fe Institute, of which I had not heard, is indeed an interesting 
place, and altogether another good reason for visiting Santa Fe. I'll have 
to investigate the site further, but I think they are working on another 
project, that is, "poverty traps" and cross-generational poverty. The 
question that sticks in my mind is whether this must be treated as purely a 
"social justice" question, or whether there are profound economic consequences.

I have found a rather interesting source, the University of Texas 
Inequality Project, http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/ headed by James Galbraith. 
this project has a large number of papers which, alas, are in a technical 
language for which my economic education is insufficient. The focus of this 
group, as far as I can tell, is on the social and political consequences of 
inequality rather on the purely economic consequences, and on the technical 
measures of inequality. Nevertheless, they believe that they have debunked 
the "Kuznets" curve, which purported to show that while inequality 
increases in developing countries, it decreases as workers become more 
industrialized. This curve was an implicit defense of the disruptions that 
industrialism causes, its main thesis being, "don't worry about the 
problems today, the market will correct everything tomorrow." Alas, manana 
never comes.

Another promising source is the "Network on the effects of Inequality on 
Economic Performance" at UC Berkeley 
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/macarthur/inequality/ This group asks the 
question, "What is the relationship between inequality and the economic 
success of nations, firms, and local communities? " which I think comes 
closer to the heart of the matter. They have a great deal of material, but 
it is highly technical and a slow read for me. Someone really needs to 
translate this work into English.


John C. Médaille

"A dead thing can go with the stream...
but only a living thing can go against it."
         -G. K. Chesterton
http://www.medaille.com/distributivism.htm
john@medaille.com