Tuesday, February 28, 2017
March 1st Blog
In
both “Why the Rich are Getting Richer” by Robert Reich and “The Upside of
Income Inequality” by Gary Becker and Kevin M. Murphy are useful readings for
research by authors with the qualifications and authority to back up their
work. Both readings talk about income inequality in the U.S., although Becker
and Murphy’s article is centered more around the payoff of education and other
skills. Becker and Murphy’s article is well organized and keeps the reader
interested with easy to follow graphs and explanations of these graphs. These
graphs also get more specific with African Americans and woman graduates if you
needed to do specific research. Reich’s work is more broad and take more of a
historic approach. Reich also gives us comparisons of what he would believe or
believed the effects of economic inequality will have on us. For example, Reich
writes, “By 2035, twice as many Americans will be elderly as in 1988, and the
number of octogenarians is expected to triple.” (Reich 492). Why should you
bother reading what these men have written, what qualifications do they have?
All three of these men have put their qualification at the beginning of their
work to prove to their readers that they are quaffed. Gary Becker won the Nobel
Prize in 1992, teaches at the University of Chicago and is a senior fellow at
the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Kevin M. Murphy is Becker’s colleague at
Chicago and Hoover and was also the winner of the 1997 John Bates Clark Medal
of American Economic Association, which is awarded to outstanding economists
under the age of forty. Robert Reich is a professor Public Policy at the
University of California at Berkeley, served as secretary of labor in the first
Clinton administration and, before that as a professor of economics at Harvard.
Reich has also written numerous books on economics and has been a lectures for over
a dozen years.
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Both of these articles are definitely useful. For someone, like myself, who never really thinks of economics, these readings helped me to develop an opinion on such things. I do agree that “The Upside of Income Inequality” focused on job skills in relation to the gap in incomes and how it is beneficial to the economy. The graphs were useful in helping others compare the inequalities and understand how some inequality is needed for a better off overall economy. Instead of advocating for complete equality, it agrees to the concept of harder work leading to higher payoff. “Why the Rich are getting Richer and the Poor, Poorer” is useful because it actually explains the process leading up to the inequality. It gives a better explanation of the way the economy works in relation to corporations and foreign affairs. It also lays out a time table and like you said- is very broad. The author succeeded in giving a good understanding on the lessening demand for routine jobs because of businesses wanting to spend less money. The widening gap was displayed in a way that contrasted highly developed and lesser developed countries- where people may not have thought to compare the two before. Specifically, the article reads that the reason for lower American wages is because people in worse- off situations are more willing to work for less money.
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