From: Gerald A. Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Sat Oct 02 2004 - 08:52:06 EDT
> What do you think is the reason why 90-95% of the income distribution > can be characterised by an exponential distribution, and why is the > distribution invariant over decades? > Do you think that a unimodal income distribution is an empirical > indication of a tendency to equalisation? Ian, To begin with, in what nations? Over what time periods? What are the variations rather than just the trend? For which income groups? _If_ there is unimodal distribution, then can that be seen as an empirical indication of a tendency towards equalization? On the contrary, we would expect -- given existing inequalities -- that if there were such a tendency than it would manifest itself empirically in a long-term _decline_ in wage disparities rather than relative stability in wage disparities. What I think might be an interesting exercise is to -- for a whole series of nations -- test to see whether wage disparities increase or decrease when GDP is growing or declining. This might also tell us whether the assumed long-run stability is cyclical. One also has to identify the trends more concretely that have affected wage disparities in the time period and social formations examined. For example, certain contingent phenomena might exert a pressure for a decrease in wage disparities (e.g. the international struggle by the women's movement for wage parity with men) while other trends might increase wage disparities (e.g. the trend towards an increase in the percentage of the workforce who are contingent, i.e. part-time, workers). And one would want to examine to what extent there has been a net gain or loss in skilled workers as a percentage of the wage-earning workforce. One would have to ask whether there are significant measurement problems and in what direction that biases the statistical results. For example, if the income of 'guest workers' and undocumented workers are excluded from the statistics, then the actual wage distribution could be _significantly_ more unequal than the official statistics indicate. What about the income of other workers employed in the underground economy? In solidarity, Jerry
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