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.
Scientists have been manipulating DNA for decades, but early genetic-manipulation techniques were slow, expensive and geared to individual species.
Enter CRISPR — a fast, cheap and flexible way to make precise changes in any cell’s DNA.
CRISPR’s enormous promise has both scientists and investors aggressively seeking new therapeutic applications, including altering a gene within retinal cells to restore sight to patients with a rare cause of heritable blindness.
A more ambitious goal is to modify the “germ line,” the cells that give rise to sperm and egg, thereby creating genetic alterations that could be passed on to a patient’s children. The hope would be to eliminate inherited diseases like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy or Huntington’s disease. Edits in the human germ line must be made on in-vitro-fertilized human embryos. And that’s where serious concerns arise.
First, CRISPR technology is not yet safe enough for medical use in human embryos. In early attempts to perform CRISPR edits in an embryo, scientists based in China detected unanticipated changes at multiple sites in the genome, which might have caused birth defects or diseases if the embryo had been brought to term. Recent attempts in an American lab were more encouraging, but improved accuracy resulted from unexpected and poorly understood biochemical mechanisms.
While some medical scientists argue that it’s morally wrong to withhold the cure to a genetic disease, the alteration of the human genome raises profound ethical questions. What if we used technology to select specific traits in offspring — height, skin color or intelligence? How would widespread genome editing affect the population genetics of our species in the future? If a sophisticated experimental technique like CRISPR is available only to the rich, could it exacerbate and entrench economic inequality at the biological level?
Issues such as these cry out for international consensus. For now, the laws of many Western European countries and the policies of American research agencies establish a moratorium on genetic manipulation of the human germ line. But a panel from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report exploring the way forward for human gene therapy. Inaction by society is not an option. It is crucial that the pace of policymaking match the inevitably rapid advancement of genome-editing technology.