Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"Figuring this out may be one of the greatest challenges of our time. Much greater than space travel, perhaps even than curing cancer. After all, what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life as we have known it. We have the resources. What we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us."

"Second, as countries started to experiment with the model and try out variants of it, it became clear the poor don’t need as much handholding as the design of the original CCTs implied. There has been a complete turnaround in the public conversation on redistribution, and the Progresa experiment and its successors contributed a lot to it."

"First, they demonstrated nothing terrible happens when one gives cash to the poor. As we will see in the next chapter, they don’t drink it all and they don’t stop working. This was instrumental in shifting the public perception on redistribution all over the developing world."

"Latin America, for many years the example everyone used for growth with exploding inequality (which then turned into inequality with no growth), where the recent decades have seen a significant reduction in inequality. This was partly driven by rising commodity prices, but also in part by policy interventions, higher minimum wages, and large-scale redistribution in particular."

"According to the World Inequality Database, the share of the top 1 percent of income in India’s GDP increased from 7.3 percent in 1980 to more than 20 percent in 2015. In China, where there was a bit more effort, it still went up, but by less, from 6.4 percent to 13.9 percent."

"Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the mantra that government is corrupt and incompetent has produced the kind of jaded citizenry who can react to news of shameless corruption among its elected leaders with a shrug, from Washington, DC, to Jerusalem and Moscow."

"Putting too many constraints on government officials and government contracts can discourage talent when it is the most needed."

"In contrast, when the study was again replicated in Denmark, which is justifiably proud of its social sector, researchers found the exact opposite as in India: those planning to join the government were much less likely to cheat."

"Students were free to lie about the numbers they rolled, and roughly the same proportion as in Switzerland did. But, just as those who were reminded of their identity as bankers cheated more in Switzerland, in India students planning to work for the government cheated more."

"This kind of sorting can turn into a vicious cycle. If only the less able work in government, we get an ineffectual government no one of talent would want to join"

"Whenever a good is rationed, the temptation to just pay one’s way in is very strong. This was made abundantly clear by the admission scandals that shook elite private universities such as Stanford and Yale in 2019."

"Part of the root of the skepticism of government is a widely shared obsession with corruption in government across the world."

"In part also, as we suggested earlier, it relates to a distrust of the elite. Government programs are seen as the elite’s way of subsidizing everyone but hard-working white (males?)."

"In the United States, there is clearly an ideology of self-reliance, even though for many years it has been based, to a significant extent, on a fantasy— the states in the US where people take the most pride in their autonomy are also the ones most dependent on federal subsidies (Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Montana top the list by federal aid as fraction of revenue)."

"Why are people so suspicious of the government? A part of it, no doubt, is historical. In India, people have seen too many instances where the government reneged on a pledge."

"Thus, when judging themselves, Americans are about right, but when they anticipate the behavior of their friends and neighbors, they are much too pessimistic."

"This was a perfect opportunity to see whether lowering tax rates made a difference to people’s willingness to work; we can just compare labor supply before, during, and after the tax holiday. The answer is it changed not at all. There was absolutely no impact on whether people decided to work or not, and no effect on hours worked either."

"In other words, although it might be desirable in terms of limiting inequality, the current proposal to raise income tax rates above 70 percent is unlikely to deliver so much new money to the state. A wealth tax would raise more revenue as long as steps were taken to reduce evasion."

"The second implication is that if collectively we as a society do not manage to act now to design policies that will help people survive and hold on to their dignity in this world of high inequality, citizens’ confidence in society’s ability to deal with this issue might be permanently undermined. This underscores the urgency of designing, and adequately funding, an effective social policy."

"We argued before that we should be wary of any policy sold in the name of growth because it is likely to be bogus. Perhaps we should be even more scared if we think that such a policy might work, because growth will benefit only the happy few."

"This has two implications. First, the obsession with growth at the root of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, and that no subsequent president has taken issue with, has caused lasting damage. When the benefits of economic growth are largely captured by a small elite, growth can be a recipe for a social disaster (like the one we are currently experiencing)."

"Behind the anti-immigrant views, as we argued in chapter 2, are two misconceptions: an exaggeration of how many migrants are coming in, or about to come in, and a belief in the nonfact that low-skilled immigrants depress wages. More international trade, as we saw in chapter 3,hurts the poor in rich countries. This has provoked a backlash not only against trade, but also against the existing “system” and the elites."

"Therefore, when growth either fails or fails to benefit the average guy, a scapegoat is needed. This is particularly true in the United States, but is happening in Europe as well. The natural foils are immigrants and trade."

"Workers were willing to tolerate pay inequality, but only when it was clearly tied to performance."

"For respondents who originally identified with the Republican Party, this made them even less likely to agree that the government could be part of the solution."

"All in all, the white non-college-educated working class collapsed after the 1970s, and this was probably a product of the specific kind of unequal economic growth the country experienced."

"Other English-speaking countries that have pursued a broadly similar social model to the US, namely the UK, Australia, Ireland, and Canada, are also going through a similar change, albeit in slow motion."

"Life expectancy declined in 2015, 2016, and 2017 for all Americans. This grim trend is specific to US whites, and in particular to US whites without college degrees: in all racial groups in the US except the whites, mortality is falling."

"The majority of Americans whose wages and income have stagnated, and who confront an ever-widening gap between the wealth they see around them and the financial woes they are experiencing, face a choice between blaming themselves for not benefitting from the opportunities they believe their society offers and finding someone to blame for stealing their jobs. That way lies despair and anger."

"Americans also generally believe effort is rewarded (with the corollary that the poor must be in part responsible for their own plight), and probably for this reason, those who believe mobility is high also tend to be suspicious of any government effort to address the problems faced by the poor."