This is a video I’ve been wanting to do for a while. It covers the three biggest things that drive me crazy about inequality discourse, along with my favorite theory for why that discourse is inescapable.
Please watch and yell at me in the comments.
Notes:
Conveniently, EconGOAT Noah Smith just wrote about zero-sum thinking:
This video was also partly based on his earlier article on elite overproduction:
One side effect of the Industrial Revolution was that land became less essential for wealth creation. You can view the World Wars as the last gasp of zero-sum, land = prosperity thinking (unfortunately, not all world leaders have gotten the memo). The decline of territorial warfare means we now live in the most peaceful era in human history: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
It may be hard to believe, but when I was an undergrad, we thought majors were roughly equivalent. We knew engineers and CS majors would get better jobs, but we assumed all the other majors were basically fine. (Side note: this list of “regretted majors” is elite overproduction in action.) Thankfully, it seems undergrads today are better informed.
Similarly, when I went to graduate school for history, I assumed a PhD would set me up for life. Shout-out to Historian Stephen Haber for literally sitting me down and telling me to get the hell out—that a history PhD was a dead end. I don’t keep in touch with much of my peer group from that program, but of the ones I know, here’s what happened:
Never used the degree; works at a family business
Tenured professor in a location I would never want to live
High school teacher at an elite private school
Precarious, grant-funded job
These aren’t terrible outcomes, but they’re very far from writing cool history books and lecturing to eager undergraduates, which is how we all imagined our lives would turn out.
I tried to be pretty even-handed in the video, but increasingly I think Zucman is an ideologue and can’t be trusted. For reference, here’s Phil Magness from 2019:
https://philmagness.com/2019/10/somethings-fishy-with-the-saez-zucman-tax-stats/And here’s Jack Salmon more recently:
CITES for the Video:
On genetics—
Armit, Ian, and David Reich. “The return of the Beaker folk? Rethinking migration and population change in British prehistory.” Antiquity 95.384 (2021): 1464-1477.
Narasimhan, Vagheesh M., et al. “The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia.” Science 365.6457 (2019)
Bajić, Vladimir, et al. “Genetic structure and sex‐biased gene flow in the history of southern African populations.” American journal of physical anthropology 167.3 (2018): 656-671.
1 in 4 hunter/gatherers died violent deaths:
Gurven, Michael, and Hillard Kaplan. “Longevity among hunter‐gatherers: a cross‐cultural examination.” Population and Development review 33.2 (2007): 321-365.
Poverty stats:
Wimer, Christopher, et al. “2023 Poverty rates in historical perspective.” Poverty and Social Policy Brief 8.4 (2024): 1-11.
Reverse Dominance hierarchies:
Woodburn, James. “Egalitarian societies.” Man (1982): 431-451.
Lee, Richard Borshay. “Eating christmas in the Kalahari.” 1969,
Main inequality papers by both “teams”:
Piketty, Thomas, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. “Distributional national accounts: methods and estimates for the United States.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133.2 (2018): 553-609.
Auten, Gerald, and David Splinter. “Income inequality in the United States: Using tax data to measure long-term trends.” Journal of Political Economy 132.7 (2024): 2179-2227.
Reality - Expectations= Happiness research:
Ekici, Tufan, and Selda Koydemir. “Income expectations and happiness: Evidence from British panel data.” Applied Research in Quality of Life 11.2 (2016): 539-552.
Downward mobility stat:
The Pew Charitable Trusts. (2012, July). Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations. Economic Mobility Project.
