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Inequality

Note to David Brooks: It’s All About the 1 Percent

There is a battle in Washington policy circles over whether the story of inequality is one of the 30 percent of the workforce with college degrees pulling away from those with less education, or a small group at the top pulling away from everyone else. The Hamilton Project recently published a paper that seemed to support the former story, noting that college grads did much better than those without college degrees between 1990 and 2013.

However, the Hamilton Project story doesn't quite fit. College grads have not been pulling ahead in the new century. The wages of workers with only college degrees have also been stagnating since 2000.

The problem with this type of analysis is that it misleads readers into thinking that a large group of well-educated Americans have benefited from the rise in inequality. In reality, the "winners" from increased inequality are really a much smaller group of incredibly rich Americans, not a large group of well-educated, upper-middle-class workers.

CEPR and Nicolas Buffie / May 04, 2015