Monday, June 24, 2013

Critique of “The Problem With Too Many Millionaires”



Josh Mowles
ECON122
Dr. Kassens
July 26, 2013

Click here for the article.

Critique of “The Problem With Too Many Millionaires”

            In this article, the author talks about how the rich are getting richer, and the middle class is disappearing.  She gives several examples of how the already rich and well known entrepreneurs are creating products that they are the only seller but there are many, many buyers.  Something else she mentions was how productivity has gone up by 85% since 1980.  Wages have only gone up by 35% during that same span. (Freeland, 2013)  She uses all this information to show the problem with too many millionaires.
            If the author of the article is correct and the middle class is hollowing, then this will begin to affect the real gross domestic product (RGDP).  What I mean by this is that if the lower class keeps getting bigger than the consumption will begin to lower.  If more people have less money to spend than this will affect the economy in negative way.  Most people think that the more rich people make, the better the economy is because that will create a lot of new jobs.  This isn’t necessarily true if you look at the production v. wage problem as mentioned before.
            Something else we learned in class is that in Milton Friedman’s Permanent Income Hypothesis.  In this hypothesis, Freidman states that consumption is based on people’s lifetime average income rather than the deviation from that income.  Consumption has the biggest influence on RGDP being that it makes up of 70% of it.  So if there are many more people making much less over their lifetime then this will inevitably affect RGDP in a negative way.
            Emily did an excellent job of using the information from the article to show the effect of the top 1% is having on the economy.  She also did a wonderful job in making her blog entry very easy to read as well as adding a bunch of material which made her blog entry very informative.  She used a lot of stats which made her brought a lot of validity to her blog entry.  I also really liked the fact that she used very credible sources in her blog entry.  One of the sources is a professor of economics at Harvard University. And the other source is the chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. 

 

Works Cited

Freeland, C. (2013, June 20). The Problem With Too Many Millionaires. Retrieved from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/us/21iht-letter21.html?ref=economics&_r=0

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