Tackling Income Inequality
By LAURA D’ANDREA TYSONLaura D’Andrea Tyson is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton. 老柯的首席经济顾问。伯克利教授。
美国的贫富差别是二十年代来最严重。也是发达国家中最严重。差别的加剧主要是最高收入0.1%的人造成的。最高1%收入人群中60%是高级经理和金融从业人员。演员体育明星占3%,医生占16%, 律师8%。
收入差别加大是越来越多的行业依靠“超级明星”, “赢者通吃”,金融业的过度发展,公司管理结构的缺陷,高管的酬金结构的变化,等。
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In the last 20 years, inequality has been largely a story of a small elite – not just the top 1 percent, but the top 0.1 percent – pulling away from everyone else in every source of household income: labor income, capital income and business income.
The top 1 percent’s share of national income has also been rising in most other advanced industrial countries, but it is by far the largest and has grown the most in the United States (see Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s “Winner-Take-All Politics”).
Why have incomes of those in the top 1 percent soared? Their occupations provide some clues. From 1979 to 2005, nonfinancial executives, managers and supervisors accounted for 31 percent of the top 1 percent, medical professionals for 16 percent, financial professionals for 14 percent and lawyers for 8 percent.
Together, executives, managers, supervisors and financial professionals accounted for 60 percent of the increase in the top 1 percent’s income, with a widening compensation differential between those in the financial sector and those in other sectors of the economy after 1990.
Superstar athletes, actors and musicians, often portrayed among the super-rich, accounted for about 3 percent of the top 1 percent from 1979 to 2005, far less than the less glamorous people (mostly men) who lead and advise America’s businesses.
Researchers have identified several reasons for the rapid growth in incomes for the occupations that make up most of the top 1 percent, including “winner take all” technical innovations that have changed the labor market for superstars in all fields; increases in business size and complexity; a growing premium for highly specialized skills; changes in the forms of executive compensation, including the rise of stock options and weaknesses in corporate governance; and the increasing size of the financial sector.