Misinformation on economic inequality

A recent piece of mine titled "Bernie Sanders’ Inequality Fallacies" created confusion among readers. Typically, those who disregard an argument and reply with misinformation can be ignored. But given the pervasiveness of misinformation among the intelligentsia and general public, it merits a response.

My article pointed out that a widespread fallacy about economic inequality is drawing conclusions based on statistical categories rather than human beings. This point seemed to escape many commenters:

“So the fact that real wages have been flat or declining while GDP triples and productivity doubles in the past four decades are meaningless?”  

“Wages have been frozen since 1969, but actual physical productivity has increased approximately 90 % over that time period.” 

“The result of more than forty years of conservative driven economic policies is that wages have stagnated for forty years, not six. That is just a fact.”

Inequality Fallacies

My op-ed on economic inequality is up at the Daily Caller. Some snippets:

Fallacies abound about economic inequality, but one of the worst is confusing income categories with human beings.

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders recently perpetrated this confusion: 

“Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1 percent … Unchecked growth – especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent – is absurd,” he fulminated. 

But the “top one percent” and the “bottom 99 percent” are statistical categories — not living and breathing human beings. Confusing the one with the other encourages fallacious thinking.