As a warm-up for the re-start of PO4730 in a couple of weeks, here are some short reads that are relevant to things we discussed last term.

• Martin Wolf arguing that “America’s inequality need not determine the future of Britain“
• Greg Mankiw pointing to a paper looking at how the rich earn their livings
• John Sides on “The Politics of the Top 1 Percent“
• Andrew Gelman on how “Surveys show Americans are populist class warriors, except when they aren’t
• Andrew Gelman pointing to a post of his own and some political science responses on “on how politicians try to mold public opinion“
• Larry Bartels and Marc Hetherington on “Surprising Trust in Government“

Updated 2012/01/03

• Daron Acemoglu’s FiveBooks interview on inequality
• A video of a Harvard Kennedy School panel discussion on inequality

For those taking classes (MSc and SS) with me who have upcoming assignments, you may find it interesting and/or helpful to take a look at some data that relates to some of the issues that we have been discussing this term.

As inequality has been a theme in both classes, I have uploaded an export of the “Top Incomes” data from Atkinson et al to the class WebCT pages. (It’s available from the web site directly, but the export can be slightly fiddly.) It is a .csv file that you should be able to open in any spreadsheet (e.g. Excel).

Klaus Armingeon and collaborators make available two data sets – “Comparative Political Data Set I (23 OECD Countries)” and “Comparative Political Data Set II (28 Post Communist Countries)” – on their website. This aggregates together data from a whole variety of sources. See the codebooks for details of the variables, but you’ll find measures of electoral turnout, female political representation, electoral proportionality, welfare spending, and numerous others. They provide the data in the Excel format.

The Quality of Government Insitute at Gothenburg makes available “The QoG Time-Series Data” that you can find by clicking on the “Data” tab to the left of the home page. This data set is even larger than the Armingeon et al ones, and covers many more variables as well as many more countries. Again, see the codebook. The file is available in the .csv format.

Updated (2011/11/10)

Frederick Solt provides “The Standardized World Income Inequality Database“.

For my inequality class, here are a few links to some brief bits of writing, audio, and video that relate to some of the issues we’ve been talking about for the past few weeks.

• David Brooks on “The Wrong Inequality“.
• Paul Krugman on “Graduates versus Oligarchs” (thanks Sam for the link).
• Greg Mankiw responding with a post on “Educating Oligarchs“.
• Will Wilkinson (The Economist) responding to Brooks/Krugman with a post entitled “Paul Krugman gets distracted“.
• M.S. (The Economist) with a post entitled “Washington’s rich, but the 1% are elsewhere“, complete with data and a nice map.
• Lane Kenworthy asking, “Were the Bush tax cuts worse for progressivity or for revenues?“, and providing an answer. Perhaps helpful for those who are not clear about the relationship between tax rates, progressivity, and revenues.
• A BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed podcast on “Changing Incomes” (starts about 13mins in) that has a discussion about social mobility.
• A video TED talk by Richard Wilkinson on “How economic inequality harms societies which covers the material from his (co-authored) “The Spirit Level” book.