International Perspectives On Household Wealth

Book Description

The contributors to this comprehensive book compile and analyse the latest data available on household wealth using, as case studies, the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Finland during the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. The authors show that in the US, trends are highlighted in terms of wealth holdings, among the low-income population, along with changes in wealth polarization, racial differences in wealth holdings, and the dynamics of portfolio choices. The consensus between the authors is that wealth inequality has generally risen among these OECD countries since the early 1980s, although Germany stands out as an exception. In the case of the US, it is also noted that wealth holdings have generally failed to improve among low-income families and that the racial wealth gap widened during the late 1980s.

International Perspectives on Household Wealth also contains new results on a number of topics, including measures and changes of wealth polarization in the US, measurement and changes of portfolio span in the US, asset holdings of low-income households in the US, and the effects of parental resources on asset holdings in Chile.

Academic, government, and public policy economists in OECD countries, as well as those in so-called middle-income countries around the world, will find much to engage them within this book. It will also appeal to academics and researchers of international and welfare economics and other social scientists interested in the issue of inequality.

Assets for the Poor: The Benefits of Spreading Asset Ownership
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Assets for the Poor: The Benefits of Spreading Asset Ownership

Manufacturer: Russell Sage Foundation Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0871547643

Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It, Second Edition
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A must

Timely proposals to ease America's most pressing political and social problem

the alarm has been sounded

Very Nice Survey of Wealth Inequality

Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It, Second Edition
Edward N. Wolff
Manufacturer: New Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1565846656

Book Description

A revised and expanded edition of the shocking study that changed the way we think of wealth in America. A work that sparked widespread controversy when it was first published, Top Heavy is acclaimed economist Edward N. Wolff's eloquent presentation of the facts of wealth inequality in the United States. In a completely revised and updated edition of the book the Boston Review hailed as "the leading contemporary study of the distribution of wealth," Wolff reveals the unprecedented rise in recent years of wealth inequality and shows how it is one of the major forces challenging democracy and economic opportunity in America. Wolff vividly illustrates how the gap between the haves and the have-nots in terms of wealth is greater now than at any time since 1929, immediately preceding the Great Depression. As the nation considers trillion-dollar tax cuts and the abolishment of the estate tax, Top Heavy takes a sobering look at how the wealth of the top 1% of households continues its heartstopping expansion while the current distribution of wealth in America invites the surprisingly apt comparison with the class-dominated societies of nineteenth-century Europe. Top Heavy will continue to be an essential reference point in any discussion of what an economically healthy America might look like. B/W charts and graphs throughout.

Customer Reviews:

A must.......2007-01-10

This is a must read for anyone interested in economic inequality. Excellent social science and readable.

Timely proposals to ease America's most pressing political and social problem.......2005-12-29

No feature of American political life astonishes me more than the almost complete silence of politicians and journalists and the media concerning the most pressing problem is contemporary American life: the dramatically increasing inequality between the haves and have nots in the United States. According to Federal Reserve figures the share of the national wealth held by the top 1% of the population has risen from 20$ in 1979 to 37% by 1997. I have not seen figures since that date, but after Clinton continued the deregulation started by Reagan and continued by Bush 41 and then Bush 43 engaged on an inconceivably lavish give-back program in the nation's history, it would be impossible to imagine that the figures have improved since then. What is the figure now? 40%? 45%? 48%? Here is what frightens me: Edward Wolff published the revised version of his novel in 2002, submitting the manuscript to the publishers before Bush's incredible largesse to the rich took place in 2002. The problem was, in Wolff's view (and in the view of most responsible economists), pressing and dire in 2001. How much worse has it gotten since a string of tax cuts and policy changes that have unquestionably have made a serious problem vastly worse?

Wolff's concern in this well-documented work are twofold: first, he wants to delineate the nature of the economic inequality that currently pervades the United States to a degree found in no other developed country; second, he wants to suggest one way partially to rectify the problem: for the United States to adopt a wealth tax similar to one that exists in several other nations.

Most people, when they think of economic inequality, think in terms of income inequality. Such inequality does indeed exist, but Wolff shows that the most damaging inequality is wealth inequality. The point, once stated, is obvious. Two families with the same income could nonetheless have very significant differences in economic well-being if one has far more wealth than the other, i.e., property and durable goods and other holdings. The problem in the United States, as demonstrated by the Fed statistics I noted above, is that virtually all the wealth is held by the top 20% of the populace, with the top 1% holding a disproportionate amount of that.

Wolff proposes one way to close the growing and vast gap between the wealthy and the mass of Americans: taxing wealth. Even the most conservative of taxes on aggregate wealth would, based on 1998 figures, generate approximately $52 billion dollars in tax revenue. The goal in Wolff's conception is to shift the tax burden more fairly toward the ones who possess the greatest wealth. He notes that in 2001 the United States had only two forms of wealth tax in place, both of which Bush has assaulted with impassioned intensity: estate taxes and capital gains taxes. Eliminating both of these are regressive taxes in that they ease the tax burden on the wealth while doing nothing to aid the poor or middle class. In other words, instead of the Bush administration doing something about economic inequality, they have intensified it.

I found Wolff's proposals to be highly persuasive. Unfortunately, we are still nationally in the throes of all kinds of mythology about taxes. We imagine that taxes are harmful to the economy, that it is unfair to expect the wealthy to pay a significantly higher tax rate, and that cutting taxes somehow stimulates the economy. In fact, as Wolff points out, a wealth tax would actually be highly stimulative by forcing the very wealthy to shift their wealth into more productive forms of investment.

But quite apart from whatever is economically productive, there are a host of moral and political questions. Is a society that allows wealth to accumulate among those who already have an inordinate amount conducive to the greater good? Is a society that persistently fails to aide those who have the least just? I will confess that my heart never bleeds for the very wealthy when they are asked to pay a bit more. Nor do I buy the rather absurdist arguments that tax cuts for the wealthy promotes economic growth. Historically, shifting wealth to the middle class has always been vastly more stimulative to the economy than shifting it to the rich. And shifting wealth to the rich has never generated any benefits to the middle class or the poor. As Will Rogers pointed out in the 1920s, another era where people thought giving more to the rich would benefit all, some people think that gold is like water: put it at the top and it runs down and nourishes everyone down below. But, Rogers pointed, out, gold isn't like water at all. You put it at the top and it just stays there. Until we as a nation start addressing the problem of our nation's severe economic inequality, the gold is just going to stay there.

the alarm has been sounded.......2004-02-26

This study of the distribution of wealth in America is disheartening indeed. Though it only surveys the economic scene until 1989 (a postscript brings it up to 1992), it is not hard to believe that things haven't changed much since then. Basically, it concludes that the gap between the rich and the poor has increased to a greater extent than at any time since before the Great Depression, and that the gap between the rich and the poor is greater than in most European countries.

Not only does this book outline the problem in detail, but it proposes a restructured tax system similar to that existing in many European countries, a tax system which would ease the burden on the poor, while placing little extra tax burdens on the rich-- and still raise billions more in tax revenue. Though this book is filled with statistical analyses, it is slim (fewer than a hundred pages), and those not mathematically inclined can skip to the conclusions here and there, which are written in clear, understandable prose. Well worth reading, and certain to be a wake-up call to anyone who has suspected that the middle class has been disappearing in this country.

Very Nice Survey of Wealth Inequality.......1999-11-28

Ed Wolff's book--a review of his earlier work on wealth, with some new additional material added--documents that the United States today is a more unequal society than at any time since the Great Depression.

According to his numbers--which are lousy, but are nevertheless the best we have or are likely to acquire-- in 1929 the richest one percent of households had about 41 percent of the economy's total wealth. But the leveling associated with the Depression and World War II had reduced the richest one percent's share to about 22 percent by 1945. Thereafter, the leveling trend continued. By the mid-1970s, the richest one percent's share--including the implicit value of rights and claims on the Social Security system. of total wealth was down to 13-16 percent of the economy's total wealth. But by the late 1980s, the richest one percent's' wealth was back up to 21 percent of the economy's total wealth. And scattered pieces of information suggest that the trend toward increasing inequality has continued into the 1990s.

Increasing inequality is not due to a surge in entrepreneurial activity: economic growth was unusually low in the 1980s (in substantial part because of the drain on investment resulting from the Reagan deficits). The fortunes made were, for the most part, not to any unusual extent the by-product of especially rapid economic growth.

Rising inequality is cause for alarm for two reasons: First, in a time of high inequality politics becomes nasty and democracy becomes less secure and stable. Second, an unequal economy--an economy in which the chances of striking it rich are larger and the chances of failing to maintain middle-class incomes are larger--fails to provide adequate social insurance. Risk-averse people would, if given a choice when young, overwhelmingly prefer to live in an equally rich overall but more equally distributed society.

What Has Happened To The Quality Of Life In The Advanced Industrialized Nations? (In Association With the Levy Economics Institute)
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What Has Happened To The Quality Of Life In The Advanced Industrialized Nations? (In Association With the Levy Economics Institute)

Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1843761939

Book Description

Throughout the 1990s the US expanded its lead over other advanced industrial nations in terms of conventionally measured per capita income. However, it is not clear that welfare levels in America have grown concomitantly with per capita income, or that Americans are necessarily better off than citizens of other advanced countries. The contributors to this volume investigate to what extent welfare has increased in the United States over the postwar period and provide a rigorous examination of both conventional measures of the standard of living, as well as more inclusive indices.

The chapters cover such topics as: race, home ownership and family structure; the status of children; the consumer price index; a historical perspective on the standard of living; worker rights and labor strength in advanced economies. In addition, they explore two economic systems delivering the goods - the free enterprise system of the United States and the European social welfare state. They then present international comparisons and highlight the relative advantages and disadvantages of these two systems.

Book Description

In the 1980s and early 1990s, a substantial number of U.S. companies announced major restructuring and downsizing. But we don't know exactly what changes in the U.S. and global economy triggered this phenomenon. Little research has been done on the underlying causes of downsizing. Did companies actually reduce the size of their workforces, or did they simply change the composition of their workforces by firing some kinds of workers and hiring others? Downsizing in America, one of the most comprehensive analyses of the subject to date, confronts all these questions, exploring three main issues: the extent to which firms actually downsized, the factors that triggered changes in firm size, and the consequences of downsizing.

The authors show that much of the conventional wisdom regarding the spate of downsizing in the 1980s and 1990s is inaccurate. Nearly half of the large firms that announced major layoffs subsequently increased their workforce by more than 10 percent within 2 or 3 years. The only arena in which downsizing predominated appears to be the manufacturing sector—less than 20 percent of the U.S. workforce.

Downsizing in America offers a range of compelling hypotheses to account for the adoption of downsizing as an accepted business practice. In the short run, many companies experiencing difficulties due to decreased sales, cash flow problems, or declining securities prices reduced their workforces temporarily, expanding them again when business conditions improved. The most significant trigger leading to long-term downsizing was the rapid change in technology. Companies rid themselves of their least skilled workers and subsequently hired employees who were better prepared to work with new technology, which in some sectors reduced the size of firm at which production is most efficient.

Baumol, Blinder, and Wolff also reveal what they call the dirty little secret of downsizing: it is profitable in part because it holds down wages. Downsizing in America shows that reducing employee rolls increased profits, since downsizing firms spent less money on wages relative to output, but it did not increase productivity. Nor did unions impede downsizing. The authors show that unionized industries were actually more likely to downsize in order to eliminate expensive union labor. In sum, downsizing transferred income from labor to capital—from workers to owners.

Downsizing in America combines an investigation of the underlying realities and causes of workforce reduction with an insightful analysis of the consequent shift in the balance of power between management and labor, to provide us with a deeper understanding of one of the major economic shifts of recent times—one with far-reaching implications for all American workers.

Customer Reviews:

Corporate downsizing: public perception versus reality.......2004-02-22

Headlines in the last decade of the twentieth century contained a steady drumbeat of corporate downsizing announcements. Now three professors of economics have used money from the Russell Sage Foundation to examine the record to see what actually happened to American firms during those stressful years. They wanted to know whether public perceptions matched reality.

The limited funds placed significant constraints on the resources available to the researchers. The value of their work depends heavily on their skill and judgement in using publicly available statistics and discrete private data bases to reveal more than at first sight evident. The result is a model of econometric technique.

The first conclusion is that newspaper media tended to favor the dramatic figures from large, well-known manufacturers. Manufacturing in America has been in long-term decline since 1967 and manufacturers have steadily shed jobs. So far, perception matches reality. However, agriculture and manufacturing only provide employment for 15% of the population, so this segment is not a good proxy for the entire economy.

What happened in the Service Sector that employed the other 85% of the population? Unfortunately, we can only see gross trends, because the government doesn't collect steady, detailed statistics on this segment. The researchers were forced to use some indirect techniques to tease out meaning from what was available.

"Downsizing", it turns out, is corporate-speak for upsizing. Firms laid off one set of workers - disproportionately less-educated, older, female or parents of young children - and hired on another set, by implication younger, male and single. Was the resulting workforce more productive? No, there was no change in employee productivity. Moreover, non-managerial employees bore the brunt of the layoffs, so that claims to be ridding the company of "fat" actually increased the management-to-staff ratio.

Did investors reward companies for their action? Perception says that downsizing is followed by an increase in the stock price. The reality is that stock prices remain steady or decline after downsizing announcements.

So what were the benefits of downsizing? The authors come to a surprising, but authoritative conclusion. Downsizing announcements force down staff wages so that the firm retains more profit. Simple really, isn't it?

Book Description

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that greater schooling and skill improvement leads to higher wages, that income inequality falls with wider access to schooling, and that the Information Technology revolution will re-ignite worker pay. Indeed, the econometric results provide no evidence that the growth of skills or educational attainment has any statistically significant relation to earnings growth or that greater equality in schooling has led to a decline in income inequality. Results also indicate that computer investment is negatively related to earnings gains and positively associated with changes in both income inequality and the dispersion of worker skills. The findings reports here have direct relevance to ongoing policy debates on educational reform in the U.S.

Economics of Poverty, Inequality and Discrimination

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Economics of Poverty, Inequality and Discrimination
Edward N. Wolff
Manufacturer: Dame Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Macroeconomics

ASIN: 0538845805

Book Description

This text serves as a self-contained course on income distribution and poverty, with additional emphasis on issues of discrimination. Sections of the book revisit microeconomics and basic statistics. Also includes considerable detail on the role of labor markets as a source of income differences among individuals. The role of public policy on income/wealth inequality and poverty is also fully explored.

Growth, Accumulation, and Unproductive Activity: An Analysis of the Postwar US Economy

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U.S. uses its resources poorly. Could eliminate poverty.

Growth, Accumulation, and Unproductive Activity: An Analysis of the Postwar US Economy
Edward N. Wolff
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521251516

Book Description

This book documents the growth of unproductive activity in the United States economy since World War II and its relation to the economic surplus, capital accumulation, and economic growth. Unproductive activities broadly consist of those involved in the circulation process, including wholesaling and retailing, banking and financial services, advertising, legal services, business services and many (though not all) government activities. The results indicate that the level of unproductive activity in the postwar economy has been a significant factor in the slowdown in the rate of capital accumulation, productivity growth and the overall growth rate. Here, the villain is shown to be the gradual but persistent shift of resources to unproductive activities. The consequence has been a reduction in new capital formation and productivity growth and an erosion in the rate of growth in per capita living standards. Moreover, the rise in unproductive activity is itself seen to be rooted in the logic of advanced capitalism. The forces of competition, which in the early stages of capitalism lead to rapid technical change and productivity growth, promote non-productive and even counterproductive activities in its more advanced stages.

Customer Reviews:

U.S. uses its resources poorly. Could eliminate poverty........2001-04-20

Wolff's estimate of the efficiency of the U.S. economy is 20%, spelled out on his p. 135. His study has been kibitzed on ideological grounds, but there has been no substantive criticism, as far as I know. It is a monumental, book length study, by a respected economist, and no other person is likely to duplicate it. He found that over the 30 year period from 1947 to 1976, literally 80 percent of our work force could have stopped working and the same amount of goods and services could have continued to be produced and distributed. That means we lost 120 years of output over that 30 year time period that we could have had, in an efficient economy, just by working smarter, not harder. Recent studies, using a tool called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) have confirmed Wolff's results, showing that the U.S. is last but for Greece among the developed [OECD] nations in one measure of effective use of its resources [Brockett, Golanyi and Li 1999], and that less efficient national [OECD] governments produce, on average, 58% less income per person than the most efficient ones [Lovell, Pastor and Turner 1995]. Dowd 1989 showed that the efficiency of the U.S. auto industry was about 10%, roughly confirming Wolff's estimate for the whole U.S. economy. The potential for eliminating poverty [e.g., Ackerman and Alstott 1999; Colbert 2000], and reversing the devastating and ominous failure of our society to foster a thriving labor force [Cohen 1995] should be obvious. Wolff has a very brief comment on that last point on his p. 78. Full, specific citations are available from the reviewer by email: colbert2422@earthlink.net

Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (A Twentieth Century Fund Report)

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A log-normal distribution

Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (A Twentieth Century Fund Report)
Edward N. Wolff
Manufacturer: Twentieth Century Foundation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

A log-normal distribution.......2005-03-17

Edward N. Wolff's study is an extremely clear statistical analysis of a for many reasons rather misty affair: wealth distribution in the US.

His conclusion is that 'in 1989 the top 1 % of US families owned 48 percent of total US wealth'.

His book confirms the ground-breaking sociological studies of William G. Domhoff.

As Richard C. Leone remarks in his excellent introduction: ' We Americans have always flattered ourselves that we have more of two good things than almost anyone else: democracy and opportunity. To be sure, neither is simple.'
For, beneath the top heavy wealthy lays the vast majority of US citizens with their burdens of debt, while a lower part hasn't even social security.

In order to rectify the skewed situation, the author proposed a modest wealth tax, which at the top would not have been more than 10 %. Unfortunately, US fiscal policy went the other way round: taxation on the wealthy was further reduced.

This short study (with many illustrative tables) is a must read for economists and laymen.

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Antenna Analysis
Edward A. Wolff
Manufacturer: Artech House Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0890062862

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