In other words, the monkeys cared deeply about fairness. What mattered to them was not just what they received but also what others got.
.. Monkeys aren’t the only primates instinctively offended by inequality. For example, two scholars examined data from millions of flights to identify what factors resulted in “air rage” incidents. One huge factor: a first-class cabin.
.. The researchers found that an air-rage incident in coach was three times as likely when economy passengers had to walk through first class compared with when they bypassed it.
.. The top 1 percent in America owns more than the bottom 90 percent. The annual Wall Street bonus pool alone is more than the annual year-round earnings of all Americans working full time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour
.. Addressing inequality must be a priority, for we humans are social creatures, so that society becomes dysfunctional when we see some receiving grapes and others cucumbers.
.. Consider baseball: Some teams pay players much more disparately than others do, and one might think that pay inequality creates incentives for better performance and more wins.
In fact, economists have crunched the data and found the opposite is true. Teams with greater equality did much better, perhaps because they were more cohesive.
.. What’s more, it turned out that even the stars did better when they were on teams with flatter pay.
.. Countries with the widest gaps in income, including the United States, generally have worse health, more homicides and a greater array of social problems.
.. In a study of people in 40 countries, liberals said C.E.O.s should be paid four times as much as the average worker, while conservatives said five times. In fact, the average C.E.O. at the largest American public companies earns about 350 times as much as the average worker.
.. “Inequality divides us, cleaving us into camps not only of income but also of ideology and race, eroding our trust in one another. It generates stress and makes us all less healthy and less happy.”
.. President Trump, for understandable reasons. But I suspect that he is a symptom as well as a cause, and that to uncover the root of our national dysfunctions we must go deeper than politics, deeper than poverty, deeper than demagoguery, and confront the inequality that is America today.
Big Ideas in Social Science: An Interview With Robert J. Shiller on Behavioral Economics
There’s an argument that specialization allows people to progress further in their field and is preferable to knowing a little bit about everything.
.. There are no errors in conventional economics: it’s all rational optimization.
.. While home prices were going up and up it just seemed as if anyone who raised the observation that they might fall wasn’t making an intuitively plausible observation. Until they started falling!
.. The amazing thing is that, in the economics profession of 20 years or so ago, there were no bubbles.
.. ever since Samuelson wrote this a half-century ago, that people want to maximize their consumption. All they want to do is consume goods; they don’t care about anyone else. There’s neither benevolence nor malevolence. All they care about is eating or getting goods and they want to smooth it; they described it in terms of so-called “utility functions through their lifetime,” and that’s it. That is such an elegant, simple model, but it’s too simple.
.. If the economy were to improve, what would your employer do?
A. Nothing — why should he or she help me just because the economy goes up?
B. Well, if the economy were to improve, that would mean the market for my services would improve, so my employer would realize out of self-interest that he or she would have to raise my wage in order to keep me.
C. My employer is a nice person and he would recognize that he or she should share the benefits with employees.
.. I think that if people think that fairness is such an important thing in labor contracts then modeling the world as if it’s of total insignificance is wrong.
.. it doesn’t help to have a theory based on wrong assumptions.
Judge to Banks: Does board stand behind its lawyers’ practices
In the Wells Fargo case, a ruling on Sept. 17 by Judge William G. Young of Federal District Court was especially stinging. In it, he required Wells Fargo to provide him with a corporate resolution signed by its president and a majority of its board stating that they stand behind the conduct of the bank’s lawyers in the case.