The Unassuming Economist

From a new post by Timothy Taylor:

“Writing back in 1973, Hirschman offers examples of “development disasters,” in which those stuck in the left lane have come to strongly suspect that economic development will not benefit them, and thus a high degree of social unrest emerges. and he cites Nigeria, Pakistan, Brazil and Mexico as facing these issues in various ways.

I find myself thinking about the tunnel effect and expectations about future social mobility in the current context of the United States. Rising economic inequality in the United States goes back to the 1970s, and the single biggest jump in inequality at the very top of the income distribution happened in the 1990s when stock options and executive compensation took off. But my unscientific sense is that at that time, during the dot-com boom of the 1990s, many people who were either pleased, or not that unhappy, with the rise in inequality of that time. There seemed to be new economic opportunities opening up, new businesses were starting, unemployment rates were low, cool new products and services were becoming available. Even if you were for the time stuck in the left lane, all that movement in the right lane seemed to offer opportunities.

But that optimistic view of high and rising inequality came apart in the 2000s, under pressure from a from a number of factors: the sharp rise in imports from China in the early 2000s that hit a number of local areas so hard; the rise of the opioid epidemic, with its dramatically rising death toll exceeding 40,000 in 2016; and the carnage in employment and housing markets in the aftermath of the Great Recession.  In Hirschman’s words, it seems to me that many politicians were “lulled into complacency by the easy early stage when everybody seems to be enjoying the very process that will later be vehemently denounced and damned as one consisting essentially in `the rich becoming richer.'”

Of course, no country is really one big tunnel. When people look at high or rising inequality, their views will often depend on the extent to which they feel some commonality–Hirschman calls it “shared historical experience”–with those who are moving ahead more briskly. In turn, this feeling may depend on the extent to which those who are moving ahead more briskly segment themselves off as a special and separate guild, with an implicit claim that they are just more worthy, or the extent to which they act in ways that embody broader and more inclusive outcomes.”