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Title: Myths of Rich & Poor: Why We're Better Off Than We Think by W. Michael Cox, Richard Alm ISBN: 0-465-04783-1 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: January, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.87 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The good news is the bad news is wrong
Comment: Like Will Rogers said: "It ain't what you don't know that hurts you. Its what you know that just ain't so that will hurt you." Or words to that effect. Like Ben Wattenberg's earlier book (whose title I used for this review), Myths of Rich and Poor explains that much of what you have been led to believe about wealth and poverty is simply incorrect.
The authors drill down into census data, the basic "facts" of American life, to show that we are not getting poorer. Our homes are bigger, food is cheaper, gas is less expensive, many 'poor' people enjoy home and car ownership, air conditioning, cable television, and an entire collection of things that most truly poor people would never even dream they could own.
Like David Landes' Wealth and Poverty of Nations and the best-selling Millionaire Next Door, this book does a better job of really reading and analyzing what is right -- and wrong -- about the American market economy.
All of these books show that finishing high school, staying married, and getting a job are th best poverty prevention strategies available and that the American market facilitates these things better than any other system. There are no guarantees and much of it is up to the individual. You just have to have the desire, direction and discipline to win your share of the American dream.
Rating: 5
Summary: Cox is a Fascinating 21st Century Economist
Comment: Investors will find that the book grabs them with actual data shedding light on what is really happening in our economy. Kudos to Cox for revealing the larger trends that investors need to know about to reach superior performance.
Investors will profit from education into the 5 waves of progress that will guide the 21st century.
The book concludes with powerful insights into the most important government policies for promoting economic growth. This last section puts Cox at the forefront of proactive economic science.
This as one of the best economics books that I have ever read.
Rating: 1
Summary: Happy talk, picked out of the air.
Comment: This is a profoundly devious book. The authors make no attempt to be scrupulous in presenting their data, nor do they acknowledge any writers who disagree with their perspective (except maybe to mock them). For example, their chapter on income distribution, which originally appeared in the Dallas Fed's 1995 annual report, was shredded in a widely circulated paper by Boston College economist Peter Gottschalk.
Mobility studies are very sensitive to definitions, time scales, and data quality. Honest researchers slice the data several ways to see how robust the findings are; not Cox and Alm. They used all the sensitivities to their own advantage. They're on an ideological mission
Cox & Alm stack their results in several ways. By making individuals, not households, the focus of their analysis -- which they say is standard practice, though it isn't -- subjects as young as 16 qualified. So the lower ranks were swelled by teenagers who contributed vastly to mobility just by growing up. To compare incomes over time, they used changes in real (inflation-adjusted) incomes over time, rather than comparing them to prevailing averages of each moment -- that is, they measured changes in absolute rather than relative incomes. While absolute changes matter some, most people judge their status and well-being against the rest of society, not against an ancient base fixed by a statistician.
Gottschalk's reworking of the numbers massively deflates their claims. Cox and Alm found that just 2% of those in 1975's bottom quintile remained there in 1991; by Gottschalk's calculation, 36% were. And instead of 39% ending up in the richest quintile, just 20% did. With relative measures -- which Cox and Alm don't use, of course -- 43% of 1975's bottom quintile would have remained there in 1991, and just 11% would have hit the top.
Yet the Dallas Fed version seems to have been incorporated wholesale into the book. Gottschalk's critique isn't even acknowledged, much less responded to.
And that's just one chapter. Read this, if you do at all, with only the most skeptical eyes.
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Title: It's Getting Better All the Time : 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years by Stephen Moore, Julian Lincoln Simon ISBN: 1882577973 Publisher: Cato Inst Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman ISBN: 0156334607 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: November, 1990 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The First Measured Century : An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900-2000 by Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, Ben J. Wattenberg ISBN: 0844741388 Publisher: AEI Press Pub. Date: 20 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression by Jim Powell ISBN: 0761501657 Publisher: Crown Forum Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman ISBN: 0226264211 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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