Sunday, December 26, 2010

Capitalism relies on inequality

We read that:-

In 1977, an elite chief executive working at one of America’s top 100 companies earned about 50 times the wage of its average worker. Three decades later, the nation’s best-paid C.E.O.’s made about 1,100 times the pay of a worker on the production line.

Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation.

Since 1980, the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent.

One study concluded that each percentage-point increase in the share of national income channeled to the top 10 percent of Americans since 1960 led to an increase of 0.12 percentage points in the annual rate of economic growth — hardly an enormous boost.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile.

Americans are less economically mobile than people in other developed countries. There is a 42 percent chance that the son of an American man in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will be stuck in the same economic slot.

No comments: