EconTech

I rather like the graph, except for the fact that it doesn’t fit on my monitor in one view.

Bartels bash

We’re having a panel discussion this afternoon about Larry Bartels’s new book, Unequal Democracy. One of Larry’s really striking results is his finding that inequality systematically increases under Republican but not Democratic presidents. I’ve written that I’m tormented about this result: the data seem really compelling, but the policy differences — though real — don’t seem big enough to account for the drastic results.

I haven’t solved this conundrum, but I have tried to get a sense of which presidencies account for the difference. Below is the change in the Gini coefficient under each 4-year administration since Truman. I measure from the 1st year of an administration to the 1st year of the next, on the presumption that, say, inequality in 2001 had more to do with Clinton’s policies than Bush’s.

Unequalizing GOP

You can see how robust the result is. It’s true that inequality was flat before 1980, when the White House was occupied by Democrats half the time, and rising after 1980, when Republicans held it 2/3 of the time. But the pattern is still there if you look either at pre-1980 or post-1980, and if you take out any one president, even Reagan.

It’s like the GOP has a magic inequality spell that it chants while in office. Clearly, we’re missing something.