Daron Acemoglu on Inequality

7 September, 2012 at 22:41 | Posted in Economics, Politics & Society | 1 Comment

In an interview in The Browser, MIT economics professor Daron Acemoglu says:

The trend towards inequality over the last 50 years has been very similar in the Anglo-Saxon economies, though it’s important to say that it’s not just an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. There are similar trends in many economies, though there are a few that haven’t experienced it to any notable extent.

Such as?

Finland and Sweden … The share of the national income that the top one percentile captures is significantly lower.

But plotting data from The World Top Incomes Database rather suggests something different, I would say:

The average annual percentage growth rate 1981-2007 was 4% in Finland and 2.1% in Sweden (in UK and in the US: 2.9%). Now, isn’t that an indication of Finland and Sweden also experiencing growing inequality to a “notable extent”?

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