Economic Inequality
It&#x27;s hard to take this seriously when pg asks us to believe, on the basis of a single out of context quote, that Stiglitz is a simple-minded victim of the &quot;pie fallacy&quot;. Stiglitz explicitly anticipates and addresses this criticism:<p>&gt; One can think of what’s been happening in terms of slices of a pie. If the pie were equally divided, everyone would get a slice of the same size, so the top 1 percent would get 1 percent of the pie. In fact, they get a very big slice, about a fifth of the entire pie. But that means everyone else gets a smaller slice. <i>Now, those who believe in trickle-down economics call this the politics of envy. One should look not at the relative size of the slices but at the absolute size. Giving more to the rich leads to a larger
pie, so though the poor and middle get a smaller share of the pie, the piece of pie they get is enlarged. I wish that were so, but it’s not. In fact, it’s the opposite: as we noted, in the period of increasing inequality, growth has been slower—and the size of the slice given to most Americans has been
diminishing.</i> [my emphasis]<p>More generally, it&#x27;s unclear what pg is attempting to do here. None of the arguments presented is at all original, and they are not presented in enough detail to be properly evaluated. So what are we meant to take away from this? That a rich dude is ok with income inequality? Quelle surprise.