Dean Baker
Truthout, June 9, 2014

This graphic summarizes the key inequality and policy trends (for the U.S.) traced in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Scrolling through the inequality metrics suggest the key themes in Piketty’s examination of the U.S. case: the now-familiar “suspension bridge” of income inequality, dampened only by the exceptional economic and political circumstances of the decades surrounding World War II; the growing share of recent income gains going to the very high earners (the 1% or .01%); the stark inequality within labor income (see the top 1% and top 10% wage shares) generated by the emergence of lavishly-compensated “supermanagers”; and a concentration of wealth that fell little over the first half of the twentieth century and has grown steadily since then.

June 6, 2014 (Jobs Byte)

On Sunday U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry published an op-ed in the Miami Herald, in which he gave the official Washington view on democracy and economic progress in Latin America.

“Not so long ago, naysayers doubted that the growth of democracy in Mexico and elsewhere across the Americas would translate into better lives for the people who live there,” he writes.

And then the bait and switch: “The last decade has been a story of democracy and economic achievement in Latin America and the Caribbean. The region’s economies grew at a rate of 4 percent a year, trade with the United States nearly tripled, and more than 73 million people were lifted out of poverty.”

Now the part about the regional growth rate is true. But Mexico didn’t share in the recovery:

Figure 1. Mexico and Latin America: Average Annual Real Per-Capita GDP Growth, 1960-2013

The above figure used GDP growth per person, which is a better measure than the overall growth rate that Kerry uses (since population growth doesn’t increase living standards). Note that Latin America and the Caribbean did in fact experience a growth rebound in the past decade. Average annual growth was just 0.4 percent annually from 1980-2000 – a long-term growth failure that is uncommon in the history of capitalism.

The region grew at a vastly better 2.0 percent annual rate from 2000-2013, despite the Great Recession. But not Mexico, which averaged only 0.6 percent annually, slightly worse than during the lost decades. The poverty rate in Mexico in 2012 (52.3 percent) was as bad is it was in 1994 (52.4 percent). So much for “democracy and economic achievement” in Mexico. The U.S. government of course is reluctant to acknowledge this because Mexico has been run by friendly right-wing governments for decades, and NAFTA has been the model for subsequent commercial agreements.

Junio 2014, David Rosnick y Mark Weisbrot