King sends the following piece on inequality by Steven Landsburg along.
How can we close the gap? Well, I suppose we could round up a bunch of assembly-line workers and force them to mow the lawns of corporate vice presidents. Because the gap I'm talking about is the gap in leisure time, and it's the least educated who are pulling ahead.
In 1965, leisure was pretty much equally distributed across classes. People of the same age, sex, and family size tended to have about the same amount of leisure, regardless of their socioeconomic status. But since then, two things have happened. First, leisure (like income) has increased dramatically across the board. Second, though everyone's a winner, the biggest winners are at the bottom of the socieconomic ladder.
Landsburg's piece reminds me of the Monty Python sketch "Dennis Moore:" This measuring inequality is trickier than I thought. Inequality of income, wealth, consumption, happiness, or leisure - each in stocks or each in flows - what is the "right" way to measure inequality among groups of people?
Aguiar and Hurst can't explain fully that rising inequality, just as nobody can explain fully the rising inequality in income. ...
Landsburg's article also reminds me of a comparative advantage example I do early in the semester in Principles of Micro*. The example uses a basic two-person, two-task economy with one person, Wilbon, who has an absolute advantage in both tasks. My goal is to show that even if someone is more productive in all facets of life, he can still gain by trading with somebody else. In my example, Wilbon gains more than the unproductive guy (Kornheiser), but only in terms of material goods. This is not surprising.
At times, students have noted what appears to be the inequality in the gains in my example. True, Wilbon gains more and Kornheiser has to work more. But both men are assumed to have entered into a voluntary exchange with one another, meaning both are made better-off by the exchange. Moreover, Kornheiser's greatest gains are not in material goods, but in leisure time acquired by having a more productive guy do stuff for him.
Life imitates econ. Who says we don't teach anything of relevance in our classes?
*I teach the principle of comparative advantage immediately after discussing opportunity costs because I like to try to get students to think about why we as people voluntarily trade with one another in the first place.