Are we wrong about equality?
I find that some of the ways economists just fudge data to be downright disturbing. That those are then cheery-picked and offered as input to policymakers is even more concerning.<p>As a for instance; take the claim that the Reagan years policymaking only caused a <i>seeming</i> boom in numbers due to the fact that people were no longer sheltering earnings in corporations, therefore there had to be a matching decrease elsewhere.<p>The issue I have with that is that money sheltered in a corporation controlled or heavily influenced by a particular individual is still essentially indistinguishable from being income for that person. It just resides in a nominally transparent legal fiction, that economists are not willing&#x2F;confident to pierce. If you don&#x27;t understand those circumstances or take them into account, the map you draw of the territory becomes downright dangerous to the ones using it rather than the help you nominally set out for it to be.<p>I understand that gaggles of economists are <i>trying</i> to provide alternate slices of data, but from the research point of view, if you are not looking at the real to gather your data, you&#x27;re playing fantasy football. Which frankly, given the I&#x27;ll-conditioning of the economic problem scares the shit out me.