Date: Apr 24, 2018
Source: The Daily Star
In terms of growth, should we really care about inequality?
Jason Furman

What does inequality mean for growth? That is a question economists struggle with. But while the social science debate rages on, policymakers face another quandary altogether: Does the answer even matter?

I don’t believe it does.

Economic policies in the real world are nuanced and site-specific, making the search for a single answer to the question of how – and how much – inequality affects growth a Sisyphean task.

Rather than concerning themselves with how to balance growth and inequality, policymakers would be better off focusing on how policies impact average incomes and other welfare indicators.

Policies that simultaneously boost growth and reduce inequality are the easiest to evaluate and the most advantageous to adopt. These types of approaches – what I call “all good things go together” policies – are easily applied to education, but can also work in other sectors of the economy that are squeezed by imperfect competition.

More vigorous antitrust policies, for example, could boost efficiency and improve income distribution.

It is far more difficult to evaluate policies that involve a trade-off between growth and inequality. A simple example illuminates the trade-offs. I will analyze a 10 percent reduction in labor taxes paid for by a lump-sum tax using a neoclassical Ramsey growth model.

Under these parameters, average output increases by 1 percent. But when checked against the numbers that really matter, the outcomes are less rosy.

Applying this model to the distribution of U.S. household incomes in 2010, I found that while most households would benefit from higher pretax income, two-thirds would also face higher taxes. In addition, households would have less leisure. As a result, around 60 percent of households were worse off because of the tax change, even though average household income went up, driven by gains at the top.

This scenario does not answer the question of whether the tax policy is a good idea. But most policymakers would likely object if they understood that growth would be achieved by higher taxes on two-thirds of their constituents and that voters would end up working harder to earn the same money.

Social scientists should continue to ask whether inequality is good or bad for economic growth.

But policymakers should focus more on how to achieve their economic goals.

For them, the answer may be to obsess less over aggregate data and academic debates, and more on how decisions impact real people.

Jason Furman, professor of the practice of economic policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, was chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate © (www.project-syndicate.org).
 
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on April 23, 2018, on page 7.