Income Inequality in America by Ryscavage Paul

Author:Ryscavage, Paul.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317468165
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

The Public’s View and the Economists’ View

Despite this diversity of opinion, however, there is some evidence that the public believes that American business has let them down in recent years. The results of a survey in 1996 by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University reflected as much.1 Among a number of questions about the economy asked of a sample of 1,511 adults, a couple had to do with how businesses were operating and whether they were responsible for the economy’s not doing better in the first half of the 1990s. One of the questions was (Is it because) “Business profits are too high?” and a second was (Is it because) “Top executives are paid too much?”

According to the survey, 46 percent of those adults surveyed felt a major reason the economy was not doing better was that business profits were too high and 36 percent believed it to be a minor reason. So a total of 82 percent of the public, to varying degrees, believed businesses were at fault. With respect to executive pay, 69 percent felt it was a major reason for the slow growth of the economy and 22 percent believed it was a minor reason. Almost the entire sample, therefore, felt businesses were the culprits to some degree. Although the questions of the survey were not specifically directed at the issue of growing income inequality, an “anti-business” sentiment was certainly expressed on the part of the public in this survey.

In addition to asking these questions, the Post-Kaiser-Harvard survey also asked the same questions to a sample of 250 economists randomly selected from the membership of the American Economic Association. The results of the survey of economists stood in sharp contrast to those of the public, and especially with respect to the questions relating to the behavior of businesses. Only 4 percent of the economists felt that excessive business profits were a major reason for the economy’s performance and only 12 percent thought inordinate executive pay was a major reason. In other words, the survey demonstrated a “disconnect” that existed between the public’s perception of the economic problems of the country and the economists’ views.2

The disconnect that this survey identified between the public and the economists over the problems with the economy may suggest that the intermediary—the media—has either not fully explained the economists’ findings (and this could very well be the case because the research is oftentimes very difficult to understand) or the media is placing its own interpretation on the economists’ findings.3 The political right in this country, of course, has often claimed that the media is liberal-biased. Certainly, there have been some prominent economists who have explicitly pointed the “finger of blame” at the business community based on their research findings and, of course, they attract the media. But attempting to prove or disprove hypotheses regarding the motivation of corporate America is statistically a difficult feat.

In the following pages, readers are provided with a flavor for some of the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.