Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 06/23/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
"INEQUALITY IN AMERICA
THE RICH, THE POOR AND THE GROWING GAP BETWEEN THEM"
Our title and quotes are from the print edition of THE ECONOMIST:
“Americans do not go in for envy. The gap between rich and poor is bigger than in any other advanced country, but most people are unconcerned. Whereas Europeans fret about the way the economic pie is divided, Americans want to join the rich, not soak them. Eight out of ten, more than anywhere else, believe that though you may start poor, if you work hard, you can make pots of money. It is a central part of the American Dream…
“But after 2000 something changed. The pace of productivity growth has been rising again, but now it seems to be lifting fewer boats. After you adjust for inflation, the wages of the typical American worker – the one at the very middle of the income distribution – have risen less than 1% since 2000. In the previous five years, they rose over 6%. If you take into account the value of employee benefits, such as health care, the contrast is a little less stark. But whatever the measure, it seems clear that only the most skilled workers have seen their pay packets swell much in the current economic expansion. The fruits of productivity gains have been skewed towards the highest earners, and towards companies, whose profits have reached record levels as a share of GDP…
“The elites in the early years of the 20th century were living off the income generated by their accumulated fortunes. Today’s rich, by and large, are earning their money. In 1916 the richest 1% got only a fifth of their income from paid work, whereas the figure in 2004 was over 60%…
“If all Americans were set on a ladder with ten rungs, the gap between the wages of those on the ninth rung and those on the first has risen by a third since 1980. Put another way, the typical worker earns only 10% more in real terms than his counterpart 25 years ago, even though overall productivity has risen much faster. Economists have long debated why America’s income disparities suddenly widened after 1980. The consensus is that the main cause was technology, which increased the demand for skilled workers relative to their supply, with freer trade reinforcing the effect. Some evidence suggests that institutional changes, particularly the weakening of unions, made the going harder for people at the bottom.
“Whether these shifts were good or bad depends on your political persuasion. Those on the left lament the gaps, often forgetting the greater income disparities have created bigger incentives to get an education, which has led to a better trained, more productive. The share of American workers with a college degree, 20% in 1980, is over 30% today…
“The one truly continuous trend over the past 25 years has been towards greater concentration of income at the very top. The scale of this shift is not visible from the most popular measures of income or wages, as they do not break the distribution down finely enough. But recent studies have dissected tax records to investigate what goes on at the very top.
“The figures are startling. According to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, the share of aggregate income going to the highest-earning 1% of Americans from 8% in 1980 to over 16% in 2004. That going to the top tenth of 1% has tripled from 2% in 1980 to 7% today. And that going to the top one-hundredth of 1% - the 14,000 taxpayers at the very top of the income ladder – has quadrupled from 0.65% in 1980 to 2.87% in 2004.
“Put these pieces together and you do not have a picture of ever-widening inequality but of what Lawrence Katz of Harvard University, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Melissa Kearney of the Brookings Institution call a polarization of the labour market. The bottom is no longer falling behind, the top is soaring ahead and the middle is under pressure…
“But the scale of America’s income concentration at the top, and the fact that no other country has seen such extreme shifts, has sent people searching for other causes. The typical American chief executive now earns 300 times the average wage, up tenfold from the 1970s. Continental Europe’s bosses have seen nothing similar…
“All in all, America’s income distribution is likely to continue the trends of the recent past. While those at the top will go on drawing huge salaries, those in the broad middle of the middle class will see their incomes churned. The political consequences will depend on the pace of change and the economy’s general health. With luck, the offshoring of services will happen gradually, allowing time for workers to adapt their skills while strong growth will keep employment high. But if the economy slows, Americans’ skepticism of globalisation is sure to rise. And even their famous tolerance of inequality may reach a limit.”
To read the complete article, click on
http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7055911
EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK
“LIBERATION BIOLOGY by RONALD BAILEY”
“In the case of human beings, evolution has selected for a set of genes that keep our bodies in pretty good shape long enough to mature sexually, produce progeny, and raise those progeny to sexual maturity. Time elapsed: about forty years. If a body invests a lot of energy in repairing itself, it will reduce the amount of energy it can devote to reproduction. That may be good for individual bodies, but, as previously noted, your germ cells have no interest in keeping you forever young…
“Researchers reported in the April 29, 2002, issue of Science that life expectancy has been increasing at about two and a half years per decade for the past 160 years. Demographers such as Olshansky, they note, have been consistently wrong in predicting an upper limit to this trend. In 1928, for example, demographer Louis Dublin predicted that average life expectancy in the United States would never exceed 64.75 years. Today it is 77.6 years.
“At this rate of improvement, the authors of the Science report conclude that ‘record [average] life expectancy will reach about 100 in six decades.’ Still, as far as we know, the maximum human life span is the 122 years achieved by the cigarette-smoking Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997…
“So what are your chances of living forever? First, the bad news. As Hayflick says, ‘There is no intervention that has been proven to slow, stop, or reverse aging. Period.’ A position statement on human aging issued in 2002 by fifty-one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of aging declared that ‘claim[s] that it is now possible to slow, stop or reverse aging through existing medical and scientific interventions…are as false today as they were in the past.’
“Now the good news: Despite this, researchers are making a lot of progress. Even the fifty-one skeptical researchers agreed: ‘Most biogerontologists believe that our rapidly expanding scientific knowledge holds the promise that means may eventually be discovered to slow the rate of aging. If successful, these interventions are likely to postpone age-related diseases and disorders and extend the period of healthy life.’
“The most promising immediate thing you can do to increase your changes of seeing your great-grandchildren is to stop eating so much. Calorie restriction (CR) is the only known technique for increasing the life spans of many different organisms…
“There is no question that maintaining a reasonable weight prevents the onset of many illnesses associated with aging. But what if you find the notion of living without foie gras and pepperoni pizza unbearable? Is there hope for you? There may be. Hansen hopes that by starving monkeys she can pave the way to a pill providing the health benefits of calorie restriction while still allowing you to inhale all the ice cream and beer you want. She has identified a compound that affects the PPAR-delta receptor, which improves the body’s response to insulin and glucose, mimicking the benefits of calorie restriction. The experimental drug, called GW501516 and developed by the biotech startup Ligand Pharmaceuticals, is now in early testing by GlaxoSmithKline. Researchers at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies have fed it to normal mice on a high-fat diet. The mice eat as much as they want and do not gain weight. There are no data yet on how it might affect their life spans...
“Since the damage caused by free radicals is so central to our decay, we have a far lower-tech way to potentially attack aging available to us: supplementing the body’s own antioxidant compounds. The most popular antiaging regimen, practiced my millions, is to pop antioxidant vitamin and mineral pills. Unfortunately, there is no firm scientific evidence that gobbling down such supplements actually increases life spans or even much improves health.
“Simon Melov notes that the effects of antioxidant pills are fairly weak, since most of the nutrients don’t get inside the cells where the free radical damage is occurring. Jay Olshansky dismisses megadose vitamin supplements as ‘a way to make expensive urine.’ A recent review in the Journal of Gerontology concurs: ‘The considerable enthusiasm for the use of micronutrient, especially antioxidant, supplements as anti-aging treatments or as treatments for specific diseases of later life is not supported by the currently available scientific literature.’ Nevertheless, many of us cover our bets by taking supplements anyway.”
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