The real sources of income inequality in our society

Finally, someone put together all the relevant time series on income inequality in a single chart.  It supports the argument that I've been making for years regarding the true drivers of income inequality in our society.  It turns out that pretax and transfer individual income inequality as measured by GINI has not changed since 1960.  Household and family inequality have soared as more and more people live alone or in one parent households while the cognitive elite, ever more efficiently sorted by the oh so egalitarian Ivies increasingly marry each other.  Which are, of course social changes, not economics.  Social changes promoted and facilitated by the very same people who are saying that we must do something about 'inequality', namely give them more power and money.  Yet, why should we entrust more power to the people who contributed so much to the problem that they are so boastfully saying they will solve even though the problem that needs solving (collapse of the family) isn't what they think it is? There's a reason why the class warriors always focus on on household inequality - properly framed, their argument stinks.  Click on the chart to make it bigger.



It's ironic:  we've been told over and over again that the source of growing inequality in our society is 'capitalist greed' and therefore we need to reign in the capitalist class, criminalizing more of their behavior, confiscating more of their wealth, and so on.  Yet the collapse of the family isn't due so much to capitalist greed as it is to the existential greed of the intelligentsia and the depredations of our legal system. By valorizing alternative sexuality, presenting it as the core of our identity, devaluing the nuclear family, defining maleness as a 'condition' that needs 'treatment', and so on, the intelligentsia have damaged the one thing that gave everyone a decent shot in this life:  an intact family.  And to top that off, our legal system, by persisting in the insane and brutal war on drugs have particularly ravaged the poor and working classes with constant heavy handed paramilitary violence, millions imprisoned and tens of millions felonized.

In material terms we have never been more equal - we all have cars, air conditioning, big screen TVs, cable, the internet, clean air and water and so on.  Yet in social terms the bottom half of the population's social capital - founded on the nuclear family - has almost ceased to exist.  It essentially nullifies all the standard of living gains we've made.  The capitalists have been delivering their end of the bargain by continually creating and then making the amusements and conveniences of the rich affordable to the rest of us. It's time for our intelligentsia to step up to the plate and present a vision of the good life that isn't just heterodox sexuality and libertine left wing politics.  A vision that can help repair the enormous damage their cultural innovations have caused.

And it would certainly help if our law enforcement and legal communities would stop behaving like deranged thugs.  Ah a man can dream, can't he?