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> So why has the labor income of the top 1 percent risen so sharply relative to the income of everyone else? No one really knows. Really? Isn't this what the b
by selmnoo 12y ago
> So why has the labor income of the top 1 percent risen so sharply relative to the income of everyone else? No one really knows.
Really? Isn't this what the bigger half of the book is about? It's because of rentier/patrimonial-capitalism, opportunity not being equally distributed in the system, etc.
- alexeisadeski3 12y agoRentier/patrimonialic income is not labor income.
- anigbrowl 12y agoIt's not, but you're going to pay your fund manager a lot more than your gardener even if both exert similar amounts of effort and skill (I picked fund managers because they're notorious for charging a lot of fees despite their inability to consistently outperform markets). Or to take another example, suppose you're a lawyer. You'll be able to bill a lot more money to rich clients than you will to poor disenfranchised ones, even though the complexity and challenge of your legal work might be identical. This is partly because people usually assume other people are all utility maximizers; eg within the narrower cohort of criminal defense lawyers, public defenders are generally considered to be inferior lawyers because it is assumed that if they were sufficiently good, they would go into private practice and make more money.
- alexeisadeski3 12y agoNeither lawyers nor fund managers are rentiers.
- anigbrowl 12y agoYou missed the point. I'm saying rentiers bid up pricing in those professions, affecting them indirectly. In the US, for example, there's a very clear bimodal distribution in legal income between graduating lawyers who go to work for large firms and who mostly do corporate law, and the others who don't. The former pays more than triple the latter, so guess where most of the talent goes. http://www.nalp.org/salarycurve_classof2011 http://www.nalp.org/salarycurve_classof2011