The Myth of American Inequality
From all those lists of best books of 2022, here's one with the potential to change public policy debate and discourse for the better. It's "The Myth of American Inequality," and the three authors are two Ph.D. economists, former Sen. Phil Gramm and his long-ago Texas A&M colleague Robert Ekelund, and former Bureau of Labor Statistics assistant commissioner John Early. Their subject is government statistics -- and how they present a misleading picture of recent economic history.
And the authors' conclusion is that long-standing complaints about the American economy -- that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, that we declared war on poverty and poverty won -- are wrong.
How can that be?
The first reason is that Census Bureau statistics on income, on which just about everyone relies, do not include two-thirds of government transfer payments. That made sense in 1947, when Census started reporting the number, and most transfer programs -- food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the child tax credit -- didn't exist.
But today they do, and the bottom two quintiles on the income scale (each quintile is one-fifth of households) get 59% and 24% of their incomes from government transfers.
Second, Census income statistics don't account for taxes people pay. Since the United States has the most progressive national tax system of any advanced economy -- because other advanced countries rely heavily on flat rate value-added taxes -- the bottom two quintiles of Americans essentially pay no income tax, while the top quintile provides 83% of federal income tax revenue.
When we take government transfers and taxes into account, as "Myth" does, then the "government takes and redistributes enough resources to elevate the average bottom quintile household into the American middle class." The bottom three quintiles have incomes that are not that far apart, and the second-highest quintile is not all that far ahead of them.
In dollar terms, the lowest three quintiles post-transfer and -tax incomes range from (rounded off) $50,000 to $66,000, the second quintile is at $88,000, and the top quintile is at $197,000. That's far more equal than the difference in earned income between the lowest quintile ($5,000, since half don't have jobs) and the top quintile ($297,000).
So the ratio of top quintile to bottom quintile incomes from the Census Bureau's 16 to 1 decreases to Gramm, Ekelund and Early's 4 to 1.
And the poverty rate, which government statistics peg at 12%, is only 2% when you cover government transfers. Many of these are people who "lack the basic mental and physical capabilities to care for themselves and their children" and need not income but "specifically tailored programs to address their specific needs."
The authors also expose another myth, the idea that Americans' incomes have been stagnant over the past two generations. The reason again is misleading government statistics -- inflation indexes, especially the oft-quoted CPI-U, that consistently overstate inflation and thus understate real economic growth.
These inflation indexes tend to assume static market baskets of goods and often fail to account for new products and quality improvements. In real life, when apples become too expensive, consumers switch to oranges. And how do you measure the worth of medical care innovations or the capabilities of the latest cellphones?
The argument against adjusting government statistics is that it risks political tampering, which U.S. statistical agencies are proud of having resisted. But using other government statistics to supplement familiar indexes, as "Myth" does to account for government transfers and taxes, is fair game.
If you do that to the average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees - a statistic that critics seize on to depict a static economy - then "real average hourly earnings would have risen 74% over the last fifty years rather than the official reported number of 8.7%."
Policy implications? One is that we already have plenty of economic redistribution, and maybe too much. Additional spending, such as the Biden COVID package, can cause inflation and encourage idleness. Advocates of universal basic incomes today, like John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, imagined that people freed from the drudgery of jobs would read great books and enjoy classical music.
Instead, we see jobless men engrossed in video games or mainlining opioids, resulting in reduced life expectancy, family formation and community involvement.
To reverse such trends, Gramm, Ekelund and Early recommend work requirements similar to those in 1990s welfare reforms that increased work effort, earned incomes and family stability. Would there be a backlash for withdrawing such benefits? The lack of blowback from the phasing out of the Biden child tax credit suggests not.
Other suggestions include eliminating unneeded occupational licensing requirements and more school choice, already popular and needed more than ever to repair the damage to disadvantaged children from teacher union-forced public school lockdowns.
There's room here for debate -- and debate conducted based on real facts, not misleading statistics -- to which "The Myth of American Inequality" makes a useful contribution.
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UK: National Maritime Museum declares its failure to 'reflect the legacies of slavery' and 'black voices'... sparking accusation curators are 'erasing our glorious history with woke nonsense'
The National Maritime Museum has been accused of 'erasing' British history after declaring that one of its galleries fails to reflect the 'legacies' of slavery or 'black voices'.
The south London-based institution's 'Atlantic Gallery' opened in 2007, focusing on the role the ocean has played as a route for the movement of goods, people and ideas over the centuries.
But a recent display installed in the gallery now tells visitors that it 'no longer reflects the approaches or ambitions of the National Maritime Museum,' because the 'legacies of transatlantic slavery are noticeably absent and Black voices are not well represented in the space.'
Visitors are invited to place their comments on pieces of paper in the gallery, under a banner that reads: 'How are you affected by the legacies of transatlantic slavery.'
But writer Benjamin Loughnane, who visited the museum at the start of the month, said he was 'very sad' to see his 'favourite museum growing up' has 'gone WOKE'.
Posting his feedback in the gallery, he wrote on a note: 'Please stop trying to erase our glorious history with your woke nonsense!'
In response to a critic online who asked him 'what was glorious about the slave trade,' he pointed out that Britain was among first countries to abolish the practice.
The message in the Atlantic Gallery tells how it opened in the year of the 200th anniversary of the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807.
It goes on to explain that three new walls - some of which contain messages from visitors - are 'the first stage of an ongoing project responding to the existing gallery.'
The walls were developed with the help of a 'small, intergenerational team of people from the African diaspora', it adds.
The message continues: 'This space foregrounds human stories and considers the local landscape of Greenwich and surrounding areas in this history.
'We hope this will improve the gallery and inform how the Museum presents the history and legacies of transatlantic slavery in the future.'
As recently as July last year, information about the gallery on the museum's website did not display a message discrediting the existing space.
How the National Maritime Museum 're-evaluated' Lord Nelson's legacy and the Royal Navy's links to slavery as part of plans to change displays following BLM movement
But by November last year, a similar message to the one in the physical gallery had been added.
The updated page adds that, to mark International Slavery Remembrance Day in 2021, five young people were invited to 'interrogate' the gallery.
A text written by the participants on a separate page reads: 'The Atlantic Worlds gallery needs to be re-imagined.
'The hard truths of the period between the 17th and 19th century – the rise of colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade – are difficult to confront.
'But the stories of the lives affected by these global systems, and their enduring impact today, must be told.'
'This project is a small step towards this – an opportunity to widen the perspectives contained within the gallery.
'It's impossible to transform the space for a single day, but we hope to create space for practical conversations that shift power away from the institution and into the hands of people affected by the legacy of slavery, empire, and the racism that persists today.'
The young people made a series of changes to the gallery, including changing the lighting by making it brighter, because it is 'not a place to fall asleep, but to wake up and face reality.'
The message in the museum's gallery comes after the museum removed a bust of King George III that showed him flanked by two kneeling African men because it was a 'hurtful reinforcement of racial stereotypes'.
The institution said in 2021 that the figurehead, which is understood to have been created to celebrate Britain's victory at the Battle of Waterloo, was the subject of 'frequent criticism' and was 'a hurtful reinforcement of stereotypes' .
And in October 2020, the museum said it was to review the legacy of Lord Horatio Nelson as part of its efforts to challenge Britain's 'barbaric history of race and colonialism.'
The museum in Greenwich, London, holds the hero admiral's love letters and the coat he wore when he was killed during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
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The Raj revision: why historians are thinking again about British rule in India
Tirthankar Roy
Is there anything good to be said of British rule over India? The verdict of many politicians, museum curators, TV presenters and even journalists in India is clear: the Raj existed only to exploit and oppress. It caused poverty and famine in the east, and made the western world richer. The writer and politician Shashi Tharoor in a best-selling book Inglorious Empire blames the Raj for ‘depredation’, ‘loot’, ‘rapaciousness’, ‘brutality’, and ‘plunder’. He is far from alone in that withering verdict: social media posts spread similar messages with religious zeal.
Oddly though historians have moved away from similar damning verdicts on the Raj. Over the last 40 years, more evidence on colonialism has come to light: much of this suggests that the expeditions of the Raj did not benefit Britain in the way many of their critics think. Britain, and other colonial powers, had too little power to restructure the societies they ruled and their aims were not always clear to the ruling class and seldom achievable. Yet few would dispute that the colonial legacy was profound and long-lasting. So did colonialism benefit India, or was it a uniquely evil and exploitative project?
This year is the 75th anniversary of the end of colonialism in India. Much has changed in that time – but discussion of British rule remains at the forefront of politics in India.
The Raj profoundly influenced the making of modern India
To understand why this is, it’s worth taking a step back to the origins of Britain’s colonial expedition in India. The British Empire in India, or the Raj, emerged from the Europe-Asia trade that the East India Company engaged in. The company created the state, but only with the support of Indian merchants and educated elite groups. After the mutiny of 1857, the state assumed the character that imperialism ordinarily means to most people. There were two sides to that character: authoritarianism, and commitment to an open economy.
From an Indian point of view, authoritarianism meant that the ruling class consisted of nominated officers answerable to the British Parliament and not the Indian people. Indians were scarce in top governmental and advisory positions until the interwar years.
What did the ruling class stand for? Its primary commitment was to maintain peace in a region that had seen frequent wars in the recent past and a rebellion that almost ended British rule. The regime met this aim with an enormous army and navy. The Raj stopped the 550-odd independent kingdoms from building forces. In return, the British Indian army subsidised their protection against each other. And the regime got from the kingdoms the promise to keep their borders open to trade. Barriers to overland trade disappeared, and the government secured that advantage by building railways and the electric telegraph.
Authoritarian rule also made legislation a relatively simple process. The legal members of the club freely borrowed British precedents in law. They did this with penal, contract and company laws while relying on Indian jurisprudence on inheritance and succession of property. Property rights, however, were coded better than before and redefined.
Although the Indian elite demanded representation, Britain did not concede much until World War I. But authoritarian rule faced a challenge from another side. Devastating famines and epidemics in the late nineteenth century led many to question the competence of the class governing India. So great was the embarrassment that a serious search for the causes of famines began. The enquiries concluded that India’s tropical monsoon climate posed a risk of famines and diseases by creating sudden and acute water shortages. The action plan, therefore, included railways, canal-building, collecting weather and crop data, and sanitation. These measures were slow to develop but eventually delivered. Climatic famines disappeared, and epidemic deaths reduced after 1918.
Authoritarianism, in other words, did not necessarily damage India’s well-being. That does not mean that the Raj did its job as well as possible. This was a state with divided heads: a Secretary of State for India in London, and a Viceroy in Calcutta (or Delhi), jointly governed India.
Divided heads sometimes helped governance. London, for example, was good at selling securities in the world’s cheapest capital market. But the London office had no interest in financial innovations for the sake of Indian development. Its ambitions were limited to managing the annual budget. The Viceroy was forever short of money. The British government tried too little to expand the tax base, tax the business elite, or raise loans for development purposes.
That minimalist stance meant spending in India was limited on anything that did not give the British state a direct return. With schools and hospitals, British India’s record was not just poor but worse than some princely states. Partly as a result, politically speaking, authoritarianism became dangerously unstable after 1920. Even as Indian representation grew, the federal state stayed despotic, and Indian nationalists did not accept that.
But a balanced reflection of the Raj should leave room to acknowledge the other characteristic feature of Britain’s rule in India: a commitment to openness, which meant keeping tariffs and transit taxes low and facilitating trade by legislating or building infrastructure.
The economic benefits to Britain of having an Indian empire were plain enough. The empire was a field for British investment, a source of grain, cotton, tea, and textiles, and a recruitment ground for the imperial army. It was not just the rulers who saw these benefits. Cargo carried by the railways and ships increased from five to 140 million tons between 1871 and 1939. Commercialisation on such a scale made many Indian merchants very rich. They saw the benefits of the empire too. Tacit merchant support saved the regime from the 1857 mutiny.
Was this market system exploitative of Indians? Certainly not legally. Nothing in the law permitted distributing favours to British investors in India. If anything, land ownership law was loaded the other way. Instead, the British ruling class believed that trade, investment, and migration would serve both countries. Until the Great Depression of 1930, Indian merchants accepted that too.
But openness damaged Indian interests in other ways, according to the Bengali writer Romesh Dutt. The charge is that imported textiles from industrialising Britain killed India’s handicrafts. It’s true there were considerable job losses among artisans because of imports. Yet at the end of British rule in 1947, ten million people in India were employed in handicrafts. In 1900-40, market share of handmade cloth rose from 20 to 30 per cent. Craft wages soared in the same period. The survival, even revival, of an apparently inefficient craft had owed partly to the import of cheap machine-made yarn from Britain, which the handloom weavers used.
This example shows that openness brought technologies and cheap materials within easy reach of Indian investors for the first time. In the late nineteenth century, merchants and bankers in the port cities of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, used that advantage to build factories. Thanks to these cities’ cosmopolitan environment, they could easily import the machines and hire people abroad to run them. It was far easier to hire and borrow from abroad under colonial rule than today. The government did this, and so did private businesses and institutions. Europeans who raised capital in Britain joined them.
In this way, the tropical world’s most impressive industrialisation took off in India. In 1928, 48 per cent of the cotton spindles installed outside Europe, North America, and Japan were in India. In 1935, half of the steel produced outside Europe, North America, and Japan was produced in India. There was an Indian monopoly in the world’s universal packaging material, jute sacks, and a near monopoly in tea. The capitalists in the port cities started schools, colleges, and hospitals, hiring doctors and teachers abroad, and compensating for the government’s poor record in public good. The textile-cum-steel magnate, Tatas, set up institutions for scientific research.
Was openness an unmixed blessing, then? Not entirely. It sharpened inequality. Real income created in trade, transport, industry, and finance doubled in the first half of the twentieth century. Productivity and wages in these livelihoods increased substantially. Real income in agriculture grew while there was still land available for use. As land ran out, agricultural income did not grow as fast as the population after 1920. As poverty increased in the countryside, the rural poor joined the nationalist movement. Famines made the rural-urban inequality glaring, with deaths concentrated in villages that were far from the trade routes, grain markets, waterbodies, and hospitals. By contrast, the cities suffered shortages but few deaths. Urban areas also offered more jobs and a richer cultural experience than the villages and small towns. The Indian elite sent their children to the cities to get educated and find positions in business firms or the government.
But city jobs were not accessible to all. Most migrants to these places were men. Women, who married in their early teens, usually stayed at home. The poorest of the rural earners, agricultural workers from the depressed castes, were pushed into low-wage work and had fewer chances to improve their lifestyle by coming to the city. The economic system may have increased caste and gender inequality, which persisted to the present times.
When independence came in 1947, India inherited a weak state (if military power is ignored) and a strong market from the Raj. Its nationalist leaders went the opposite way. The economic development strategy they designed set out to demolish the Raj’s legacy. They created a much larger state, with public control of finance, while restraining foreign trade, foreign investment, migration, and even a lot of domestic trade. These moves delivered a taxpayer-funded green revolution and industrialisation, but destroyed a vast pool of capital accumulated during British rule in cotton textile production, commerce, banking, insurance, and plantations.
In some other ways, the Raj profoundly influenced the making of modern India. Independent India delivered the right to vote to every adult citizen (something the British did not consider), but its parliament was an offspring of the institution known as the Imperial Legislative Council. The army was another inheritance. Thanks to the disparity in military capacity between the kingdoms and British India, incorporating these kingdoms into India and Pakistan was a smooth affair. Company and contract laws designed in the British model helped private investors.
For decades after 1947, India’s port cities were the country’s premier intellectual and cultural hubs, thanks to their cosmopolitan heritage and a lead in higher education modelled after the British counterpart. The continued popularity of the English language in business transactions made South Asians globally competitive despite disengagement from the world. That human capital proved crucial to the re-emergence of India when the economy opened again in the 1990s.
There are, of course, reasons to condemn Britain’s colonisation of India. But there is no doubt that British rule also benefited India. Any account of the rights and wrongs of the Raj must reflect both sides of that coin.
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Victimized men
Bettina Arndt
It was 2014 when I first heard from Andrew, a young Queensland dad, who was being denied contact with his two young girls. From then on, he wrote regularly updating me on his eight-year Family Court marathon, where he lost round after round, despite his wife being declared an unfit mother after a court-ordered psychiatric assessment. She very effectively used false violence accusations to get away with moving with the children interstate and endlessly dragging out the legal proceedings.
Two weeks ago, he killed himself. Since I heard the tragic news, I’ve been trawling through his old emails, so sad that this good man had lost all hope.
I also recently learned that last month another of my correspondents took his life. He first wrote to me a few years ago after being shocked by his treatment at an ACT police station when he tried to report an assault by his partner on him and his young daughter. He was told by police, ‘You don’t really want to report it. Go home and sort it out.’ When he tried to talk to his wife, she left with his daughter and took out a violence order against him. ‘You cannot believe the despair that fathers of this country are in,’ he said.
I’ve been haunted by the deaths of these two men, wishing I could have done more. The last message I received from Andrew earlier this year ended this way: ‘Your blogs are a ray of sunshine to me. In a very foreboding, stormy ocean you’re a beacon of hope and of understanding.’
Despite our despair at the overwhelming stormy ocean, we can’t afford to give up. I am more convinced than ever that we need to give men reason to believe that one day things will change. While it’s true there’s no hope of swiftly bringing down the mighty feminist edifice currently making life intolerable for so many men, I have to believe that by exposing the injustice eventually we will win over the huge majority of men and women who care about fair treatment of men and boys.
For now, that means taking solace even in small victories, savouring every sign of the slightest breakthrough. It is critical we get organised, bringing together all the small organisations working to help men, to work together to chip away at the current anti-male prejudice and injustice.
This year, we saw the first sign of a concerted international fightback against the feminist domestic violence industry. DAVIA (Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance is a new coalition of organisations promoting domestic violence and abuse policies that are science-based, family-affirming, and sex-inclusive. Launched late 2021, this has expanded from a handful of participant groups to 70 organisations from 24 countries coordinating campaigns to challenge the anti-male bile around domestic violence being promoted by international bodies across the world.
The United Nations is a classic example. This year DAVIA actually managed to block passage of two typically anti-male UN resolutions after issuing a press release which exposed their crazy thinking. Like the claim that ‘women are 14 times more likely to die in a climate catastrophe than men,’ – a nonsense statistic included in a UN resolution allegedly exploring ‘the nexus between the climate crisis, environmental degradation, and related displacement, and violence against women and girls’. Days after the DAVIA issued their worldwide press release highlighting what the UN was up to, the resolution was removed from the agenda.
No big deal? Arguably there’s little cause for concern about the UN’s posturing. As UK journalist James Delingpole writes, ‘The UN is a terrible organisation: a bloated talking shop for technocrats, bureaucrats, kleptocrats, third-world beggars, globalists, socialists, and other overindulged, grasping cry-bullies, meddlers, and no-hopers.’
But Delingpole points out that, despite UN founding articles requiring equal rights for men and women, the organisation persists in ‘picking on men and blaming them for everything that is wrong’.
That matters. These big international organisations are helping create the zeitgeist that pushes lawmakers into passing more and more draconian legislation targeting men, that prevents judges from allowing fathers contact with their children after cooked-up violence allegations, that green lights propaganda into our schools presenting boys as villains and girls as victims and that encourages despairing men to give up hope.
That’s why DAVIA’s work is important. Just last month DAVIA coordinated activities celebrating November 18 as The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Men, with activities and media events in Argentina, India, Ireland, Lithuania, Northern Ireland, Peru, Spain, United Kingdom, the United States, and in Australia.
A global Twitter campaign was launched to promote the hashtag, #StopViolenceOnMen with over 36,000 tweets sent out over a four-day period. In India, the #StopViolenceOnMen hashtag trended, ranking in ninth place among all hashtags.
Then there were the women in Argentina who invaded the offices of the Minister for Women protesting for Falsely Accused Day on September 9, another event coordinated internationally by DAVIA. I loved the feisty language – here translated from Spanish – in their letter to the Minister: ‘Even so, you, Madam Minister, together with your cohort of ideologues, officials, and communicators, will surely insist on denying that false complaints exist, that thousands of men are victims of them, and that the infamous judicial industry that feeds this order, is causing unparalleled harm to the rule of law.’
Making this all happen is Ed Bartlett who has been working for many years promoting fair treatment for men. He’s the one who started the ball rolling to put together an international coalition to tell the truth about female violence.
Under Ed’s guidance, DAVIA is currently launching an ambitious project in January to block the expansion of the Istanbul Convention (IC) in Europe, a treaty ostensibly intended to combat violence against women in Europe. You may remember the fuss two years ago when the Hungarian Parliament rejected the ratification of this dreadful treaty declaring that the measure promoted ‘destructive gender ideologies’.
Too right. The IC treaty reeks of feminist ideology, promoting the usual tired dogma about domestic violence being caused by power imbalances that favour men over women. As Stephen Baskerville explains, ‘The Convention has nothing to do with violent crime. It is a political innovation that promotes radical political ideology. Under the guise of protecting crime victims, it institutionalises sexual ideology and transfers dangerous powers to activists engaged in gender warfare against the family, religious freedom, men, and civil liberties.’
Now it looks like the Convention is in trouble. Nine years after the IC came into force in 2014, Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia have not ratified the treaty, Turkey withdrew in 2021, and Poland has announced its plan to withdraw.
Ed Bartlett has firm plans to ensure this is only the beginning. His recent email announced DAVIA is in communication with the groups in Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries that led the fight to block the Istanbul Convention in their countries. He’s also learned that, in Israel, the powerful Likud Party has agreed to not join the IC.
Not bad, eh? Here’s DAVIA’s latest summary of everything that is wrong with the Istanbul Convention. And if your organisation would like to join forces with DAVIA, you can get more information here: davia@endtodv.org.
If we pull together, there’s much we can do to ensure the New Year brings better times for men
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/the-power-of-many/
***************************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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