Phillip W. Magness

Quick thoughts on the new Piketty-Saez-Zucman Income Inequality Study at AEA

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The American Economic Association held its annual meeting in San Francisco this week. Consistent with the recent surge of interest in inequality research, one of the papers generating the most buzz was a new income inequality time series by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. The paper itself has not been released yet, but its […]

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Fed economists attempt to piketty their own U.S. inequality data

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Earlier this month the St. Louis Federal Reserve published a new briefing paper by economists William R. Emmons and Lowell B. Ricketts, in which they claimed to find recent evidence of the growing inequality trends predicted in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. As asserted in the Fed paper: “Data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances

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Dear AAUP & Media: Non-Tenure Track does not equal Adjunct

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One of the most pervasive and pernicious myths of the adjunct activist movement is the claim that somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of current university faculty are adjuncts. This figure derives from the frequently hapless, though sometimes intentional, conflation of terminology. Yet another example of this happened today in the Christian Science Monitor, which cited

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Climate change may be real, but where are all of its “victims”?

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Persons who peddle what they incorrectly label as “free market” arguments for climate change intervention almost invariably justify their prescription upon the claim that global warming causes “harm.” If such “harm” exists, then it follows that some sort of remediation (e.g. regulation, or the oft-favored carbon tax) is a legitimate corrective to the “harm” committed upon a person

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Why are there so many adjuncts in English & Literature departments?

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Though regulated and at times highly distorted, academic employment is fundamentally a creature of market forces. Full time academic employment has actually kept pace with student enrollment growth since at least 1970, contrary to a number of myths that are often carelessly repeated in the press and by adjunct activists. Full time jobs are not disappearing under any

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Saez-Zucman, the “Forbes 400,” and a new round of inequality data oddities

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When Thomas Piketty’s main inequality chart for the United States came under scrutiny from myself and others over the last year, he was largely non-responsive despite his mounting of a vigorous defense of other areas of his data. (My step-by-step deconstruction of the chart may be found here for reference. Similar criticisms figured prominently in my article

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