A: JAY CORRIGAN | PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
Slices of the economic pie are more lopsided than ever before. According to recent data, the richest 10 percent of American households earn just more than half of all U.S. income. That’s the highest fraction since the federal government started keeping these sorts of records 100 years ago. And the U.S. isn’t the only place where the gap between rich and poor is growing. During the last 40 years, the richest 10 percent gained ground in Canada, Germany and Japan.
So what explains this increase in income inequality across rich countries? Economists most often point to technological changes that have made the most talented workers ever more productive. As an example, consider that the only way to listen to professional musicians at the turn of the 20th century was to go to a live performance. The most talented performers played in the largest venues and, therefore, made more money than their less-talented peers, but the difference would have been relatively modest.
Today, most of us listen to recorded music. And because an iTunes download costs the same whether it’s recorded by the top artist in a genre or by someone less popular, the most-talented performers now capture a much larger share of our entertainment dollars. Thousands of musicians still are scratching out a living, but technology has increased the gap between the most-talented and the slightly less-talented. Something similar has happened in most industries.
To understand what, if anything, can be done to reduce income inequality, it helps to look back to the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, when income inequality actually decreased. That's because the supply of highly skilled workers increased more rapidly than the demand for their services, keeping their incomes — and income inequality — in check. This increase in supply was due to an increase in college graduates and women entering the workforce. Unfortunately, both of those trends have leveled off since about 1980.
If there’s one area where there’s still low-hanging fruit, it’s immigration. Immigrants create about half of all successful startups, but we make it hard for highly skilled immigrants to live and work in the U.S. Increasing the cap on the number of visas issued to highly skilled immigrants each year — or removing the cap entirely — would increase the supply of top talent, reducing income inequality.
Rev. Rachel Kessler ’04 explores what “The Good Place,” a popular NBC sitcom about morality and the afterlife, can teach us about becoming better humans.
I started watching “The Good Place” when it first aired in 2016, and I had some initial reservations. The moral premise of the show — that human fate in the afterlife was determined by an objective calculation of morality points — seemed, from my perspective as a Christian priest, to lack grace.
That changed with Eleanor Shellstrop’s (Kristen Bell) shocking revelation at the end of the first season: “Holy motherforking shirtballs, we’re in the Bad Place!” As it turned out, not only were our main humans (Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason) actually in the Bad Place — all of humanity for the last 500 years had failed to attain entry to the titular Good Place.
That might seem like a depressing premise for a network sitcom, but I believe that assertion of humanity’s failure is the grace I longed for originally. Individualistic moral perfection is as undesirable as it is unobtainable. Through whatever permutations and reboots “The Good Place” has undergone, the recurring theme has been that humans improve only through their relationships with one another.
If there is a moral lesson to be learned from “The Good Place,” the show makes a compelling argument that pursuing individual perfection is a losing game. Instead, “good” comes from living fully into our relationships while loving and learning from one another.
If the “experiment” that began the show’s first season was a twist on Sartre’s classic line, “Hell is other people,” the show’s ultimate premise is the refutation. Or, to quote the great Jason Mendoza: “The Good Place was the friends we made along the way.”
The Rev. Rachel Kessler ’04 is the priest-in-charge of Harcourt Parish and Kenyon’s chaplain. She wishes she could sign up for Chidi’s philosophy lessons.