Joseph Stiglitz on Inequality (June 2015)
June 28, 2015
This is an 18 minute interview from the Institute for New Economic Thinking with the leading US economist and Nobel winner Professor Joe Stiglitz.
Stiglitz, author of The Price of Inequality and The Great Divide (published in 2015), studies the forces driving inequality and what is at stake if it continues. In his view, bad economic thinking deserves part of the blame — fanciful ideas like trickle-down and the notion that economists should try to increase the size of the economic pie and let the politicians worry about distribution.
Stiglitz departs from Thomas Piketty on the causes of inequality and sees capital gains on land and rents associated with monopoly power, discrimination, and exploitation as the big story. He also faults deregulation in the banking industry.
http://beta.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/joseph-stiglitz-on-inequality-june-2015
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The problem with addressing wage issues is that the entirety of the collapse has occurred to men, and any effort to help men gets screamed down. Can you actually imagine if someone in the modern left where to say "We must increase male wages 200%!" The screaming over "Male Tears" would be unending.
This is NOT what Feminists wanted but it is how the wage difference between Men and Women has closed in the last 40 years. That is NOT the fault of Feminists or women, but of the 1% who wants all of the high wage jobs gone.
While the difference is on all economic groups, the larger difference is where it should NOT be, the higher income groups:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_States
The reason I said it should NOT be in the higher income groups, this is the economic ares where PHYSICAL STRENGTH is the least important and thus where males have their LEAST ADVANTAGES. Lower economic groups tend to be jobs where upper body strength comes into play and thus the best place one can claim a man can do the job better then a woman (i.e. can a man carry MORE weight than a woman up a ladder, in most cases the answer is Yes, thus physical strength comes into play at these lower paid jobs).
On the other hand, can a woman tell 100 men HOW to put up a building as well as a man? The answer to that is also YES, for now we are talking about design and other INTELLECTUAL activities more then physical strength.
Thus the difference between Male and Female wage started to narrow around 1970 and the economic problems of the 1970s, but the pace rapidity increased as the Steel Industries and other unionized industries declined in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus the main reason for the decline in the differences between Men and Women Earnings since 1970 has been the decline in male earnings as opposed to any increase in female earnings. Male earnings TODAY, adjusted for inflation, equals Female earnings in 1947 (and women's income is NOT up to what it was in 1947, the year the big attack on Unions took place known as the Taft Hartley act, it looks like that act hurt women FIRST and stagnated unionization efforts throughout the 1950s so male wages stagnated and females wages went into a nose dive, it took the shortages of men due to the war in Vietnam to get women's wages up but NOT anywhere near what it had been in 1947).
Male wages started to decline in 1970 as the baby boomers came into the employment market and the Vietnam war participation by US troops went into decline (Most US Troops were out by the end of 1972, some advisers stayed till 1975 but these were few given the draft ended in 1973). With the end of the draft, male wages went into a slow but steady drop, increasing rapidly under Reagan. This decline bottomed out under Clinton but did NOT go into any real increase, but held steady till Bush was elected, then it started to go into a steady decline again and continued under Obama.
Females wages stayed till halfway into Carter's term of office then do to that recession went into a decline. Female wages stayed about the same under Reagan and Bush I, then increased slightly under Clinton, then went into a decline, not as steep as the male decline, but a decline to the present day.
Feminists did NOT want this, they wanted FEMALE WAGES UP, not MALE WAGES DOWN, but what happened was male wages declined. This was NOT the fault of feminists, but of males, we failed to understand that we have to organize and go on strike, even if that meant being fired. Do not blame this on feminist, blame it on men. In the last years of Clinton, unemployment reached a level where if someone was fired, he or she could find a job quickly, but the record since Reagan of such people NOT being hired was still fresh in their minds, so no large demand for wages were made (in past time period when such low unemployment numbers were reached, wages went up and you ran into "Wage inflation" i.e. wages went up driving up the cost of everything thus increasing inflation, but that did NOT happened under Clinton or Bush II, it should have but did not. That failure has to be put at the foot of men, for men tend to be unionized to a higher level then women. They should have pushed wages higher but they did not.
