Would you be more sad if her salary went up to $15/hour (~2x), but yours went up to $210/hour (~3x, assuming you started from $70 ~= 10 x $7)? If this would not make you sad, then inequality isn't really the problem.
Incremental money at the lower end is worth way more. Inequality is the problem.
How do you reconcile this with the claim that inequality is the problem?
If you take a long look at that same graph [3], productivity has climbed, dramatically. Perhaps the depression of wages was caused by almost doubling the workforce, adding women.
Eh, it's probably not that big of a deal. that wsj article pointed out it's really just young men without much education that are taking the hit. I really doubt having millions of young, broke, easily persuaded males will cause much of a problem. Historically, that's always worked out just fine
Less snarkily, economists from Greenspan to Krugman have said this is something that needs to be looked at. It's an indicator of something being not right. It's clear you have an economic model in mind. It's the job of the market to push that pay edge as hard as possible, get as much productivity for as little pay as possible. Have you considered that the market might push so hard that your economic model doesn't apply?
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/07/06/just-how-stagnant-...
[2] http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/
[3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Producti...
Everyone getting richer is not an accurate description of reality.
The more you already have of something the less it's worth to you, that goes for almost everything including money in this case.
It's a real shame, because it is literally impossible to solve a problem you deliberately misunderstand. That's humans for you though.
Don't play dumb. They're going to break down crying when they're told what our planet went through right now. It will be like when today's children are made to really look at photos of Auschwitz, or the Syrian Civil War, or guinea-worm cases in Africa, or child labor in coal mines.
Oh wait, some of those things are still present-day problems.
Note that the article assumes poor white people all have salaried jobs with great medical insurance plans, or at least get sick pay. Of course they don't.
Therefore the article doesn't understand that lots of people fall into the trap of not fixing something when its small, and instead end up lowering the average lifespan.
Look at, say, alcohol addiction. Lack of medical coverage means if you got treatment your whole family would get the economic death penalty via direct and indirect costs, ruining all their lives, or you can auger in and ruin just yours. Either way, all outcomes of addiction are decreasing average life span.
Besides pay one of the largest burdens the poor face are all the government fees and indirect taxes that most of us don't notice in our daily lives. That twenty dollar tag fee renewal to me is nothing, but if you have to have a car and aren't clearing much twenty bucks can mean beans and rice.
Government already has the ability to track all fees paid it directly and can make assumptions about indirect fees so that the working poor; far different from the non working poor; can be relieved of some of the burden.
The only other option for solving inequality as many bemoan is to take from those earning so much so they really don't see the point and eventually everyone ends up poorer.
As well as focussing our discussion on economic equality and social justice, we can also approach the problem from a perspective of enlightened self-interest.
Widely distributed economic equality implies a greater ability to spend, and a greater ability to borrow, and a greater ability to create wealth in aggregate.
A wider distribution of wealth, on average, yields greater wealth overall.
This doesn't imply equality -- just a distribution of wealth that is closer to a Normal/Gaussian distribution, with less of it's "energy" disappearing off into the upper tail of the wealthy -- a tail which is necessarily inefficient due to its' bandwidth constraints and limited decision making capacity.
Let me suggest one of those data-driven analyses you like: for a set of equal-population regions or some such (ideally not just countries, although that might be the only way data is available), plot a happiness measure against mean wealth (income might be easier to get figures for) and Gini coefficient, and do a linear regression or similar. That should give a formula for how efficient wealth redistribution policies need to be (i.e. how much they need to lower the Gini per dollar-per-capita expended[1]) to be worthwhile in terms of increasing overall happiness.
[1] Of course actually redistributed dollars aren't expended and don't change average wealth at all. But the redistribution programme would involve a certain amount of labour that could otherwise be used productively being redirected to administration, court battles, police etc. and the value of that labour is expended.
Or in this case, would you recognize that correlation isn't causation?
Yes, although surely segregation just moves people around and can't change the average percentage, and so the net effect would always be zero.
> Or in this case, would you recognize that correlation isn't causation?
Do you think the causal factors are different then? I think inequality directly causes unhappiness in and of itself. That matches my subjective experience and the rhetoric I hear from many others.
Inflation is a separate problem.
Back in the real world however, the relative price/value/production of things is not a separate problem...and since I'm guessing most people's objections to inequality is not its effects in some hypothetical world where all concepts are independent, but in the real world where they all connected, I'm not sure hypotheticals of this nature are often that useful...
If you want to claim that inequality somehow causes poverty (and poverty is the real problem), make that case.
> Inflation is a separate problem
It's not just inflation: supply/demand dynamics will be changed across income levels. For example bidding wars might cause rentals to go up, and the mother will be outbid (see: gentrification or recent news on San Franciso rents)