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May 12, 2003

Brian Barry on inequality

Brian Barry spoke at Maryland on Friday, making a good old-fashioned case for economic equality. He cited the following statistics as evidence that we do not have much social mobility in the US: If you are a male born in the poorest tenth of the population, you have only a 1.3 percent chance of reaching the top ten percent during your lifetime, and just a 3.7 percent chance of becoming at all wealthy (in the top fifth). If you are born in the bottom tenth, the odds are more than even that you will never make it out of the bottom fifth. Barry's source is Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "The Inheritance of Inequality," Journal of Economic Perspectives 16 (2002) 3 - 30, p. 3.

May 12, 2003 11:19 AM | category: philosophy | Comments

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