Some Important Limitations of Income Inequality Data
July 11, 2015
Jonathan Nitzan
Blair Fix, a PhD student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, points to some important limitations of income inequality data. In a recent posting on capitalaspower.com, Fix shows that, in the case of the U.S., the Top 1% income share correlates not with the share of capitalists in national income (profit and interest), but with the share of corporate dividends in national income. This difference means that income-inequality data of the sort reported by Thomas Piketty and others in the World Top Income Database give a very partial and potentially biased picture of ruling class power, power that is much better proxied by all income rather than dividends alone. Blair Fix’s article: https://capitalaspower.com/forum/
The post is from Real World Economics Blog and can be found here:
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/some-important-limitations-of-income-inequality-data/