Diminishing Returns
Thursday, July 30th, 2009In his TRB column in the New Republic, Jonathan Chait discusses Will Wilkinson’s Cato Institute paper on income inequality. Wilkinson thinks it shouldn’t bother us so much. Chait disagrees.Wilkinson’s most interesting argument holds that material inequality between the rich and the non-rich lags behind the wealth and income gaps. For one thing, he argues that the luxury goods rich people own offer only marginal improvement over the cheap stuff that poor people own. For instance, he compares the


