Armine Yalnizyan has a commentary in The Globe and Mail: We're ignoring inequality at our peril. Excerpt (but read the whole article, and then download the CCPA report):
Concern about growing inequality has been a hot topic in the U.S. for the past few years, triggered by the path-breaking work on income distribution by economists Thomas Picketty and Emmanuel Saez in 2003 and Emmanuel Saez and our very own Mike Veall in 2005.
That research took the story up to the year 2000. When Saez updated the story for the U.S. last year, it triggered a storm of debate in the media and among people trying to cope with a troubling dynamic – the gains from growth are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the rich.
Earlier this year at the Canadian Economics Association annual meetings, Mike Veall showed slides from the Canadian updates, running to 2007. On Wednesday, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report based on these unpublished data, generously shared by Prof. Veall.
It shows that this generation of rich Canadians now takes a bigger cut of the action than any previous generation. The richest 1 per cent accounted for a third (32 per cent) of all income gains from economic growth between 1997 and 2007. This is four times the share of growth in the 1960s, and double the share of growth in the Roaring Twenties.
The richest 1 per cent accounted for 14 per cent of all personal income by 2007 -- levels comparable to the mid 1920s.
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