The Point: This paper looks at the overall gains in life expectancy in the United States and contributes to the discussion of how equally or unequally these gains have been distributed across different segments of the population. Although, life expectancy in the United States has been growing since the 1990s, quite a bit of recent research has suggested that inequality of life expectancy is increasing. Such findings, however, have been largely based on looking at life expecta

The Point: The "99%" and the "1%" - we often talk about these groups as if they are static, frozen in time, but are they? Hirschl and Rank draw light into the dynamic nature of inequality in this paper by attempting to calculate the likelihood that an American, at some point between the ages of 25 and 60, will earn an income that is in the top 20th, 10th, 5th, and 1st percentile of incomes in the country. They find that the number of individuals that earn an income in the to

The Point: Rognlie starts by highlighting the link between recent discussions on inequality and the area of macroeconomic research dealing with capital and labor shares of income. Piketty, for example, argues that the high concentration of capital in the hands of a few, and returns on capital, which exceed the overall growth rate of an economy will exacerbate inequality. Economists including Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez have pointed in their work to a rising share of capital i