And speaking of inequality, Megan McArdle kicks off a series of articles and posts at Bloomberg on the subject:
If we want to have a public discussion about inequality, the first thing we have to do is define which sorts of inequality meet the definition of a “problem.†We then need to decide which of these problems should be solved. Not every problem qualifies.
The history of public policy is littered with “solutions†that turned out to be worse than the problem they were supposedly solving — the political equivalent of the proverbial fool who blows his own head off to cure his headache.
I can offer one suggestion that I’m sure won’t be heeded: policy should disaggregate the economic effects from the non-economic ones. Lumping them together tends to benefit the beneficiaries of the economic side effects of policies rather than the intended beneficiaries of the policies.
