Thomas Sowell - Is "Income Stagnation" an Economic Myth?

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2008/02/21/Uncommon_Knowledge_Thomas_Sowell

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell argues that reports of stagnation among American incomes over the last several decades are economic and political myths.

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Peter Robinson speaks with Thomas Sowell about his new book Economic Facts and Fallacies in which Sowell exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues.

Sowell takes on the conventional thinking on a wide swath of America's economic life, from male-female economic differences to income stagnation, executive pay, and social mobility to economics of higher education. In all cases he demonstrates how economics relates to the social issues that deeply affect our country - Hoover Institution

Thomas Sowell is an American economist, political writer, and commentator. He is currently a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 1990, he won the Francis Boyer Award, presented by the American Enterprise Institute. In 2002 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal for prolific scholarship melding history, economics, and political science.

Peter M. Robinson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he writes about business and politics, edits Hoover's quarterly journal, the Hoover Digest, and hosts Hoover's television program, Uncommon Knowledge.

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• households
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• jobs
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[Welsh77]

@jivinthegreat you want to compare a household with two earners to a household with one earner and not divide the former's by 2 to have an equivalent comparison? it sounds like there's lots of inequality because you want inequality to exist, but when you look at income per earner even in the lowest quintile it outpaced GDP growth during both of bush's terms. those are the facts, but they conflict with a vision bent on redistribution.

[ShazamVanBane]

@jivinthegreat perhaps he doesn't want to believe a country with so many resources and power could possibly be going no where, or even backwards, and is trying to he a positive and optimistic example of a black man, rather than the kind always shown on tv and movies, the complainer and passionate type.

[migkillertwo]

"I'm not sure why Jake would describe these rates of savings as a catastrophe waiting to happen. It is clearly better than what Americans are doing which is, at best, paying off debt."

To which I say "the number of working people in the top 20% is some multiple of the number of working people in the bottom 20%"

[jivinthegreat]

Oh wow, did he really cite per-capita income when attempting to address a statistical fallacy regarding income stagnation? Most of this rise in income happened among the top 1% of earners. And using household income to begin with actually understates the inequality because there are far more double income households. I can't believe someone of this caliber is being such a tool.

[happinesson]

i agree with facts you have lied down..income stagnation is no longer a myth!

[ElJefer]

You could become the greediest person on the planet and not make one more dime  ~Thomas Sowell

[AtibbsSPARTAN]

How many thousands of misguided high school and college teachers are out there spewing misguided facts about family income?

It's scary how little people know about economics.

[tomperanteau]

An honest and intuitive man.

[aussieconservative]

@Cornampoo furthermore people move from one income bracket to another. the idea that 20% at the top is fixed is just fallacious. the first forbes 100 rich list contained 35 Rockefellers' the most recent list didnt contain any with david rockefeller coming in at #147. Its like the statistical misunderstanding which goes "I hear that a man gets hit by a car every 8 minutes in NYC" to which another man replies 'wow he must get awfully tired of that'. The same logic is in play.

[Cornampoo]

@BenkaiDebussy if you talk changes the mean is a pretty good measure for that. Median doesn't mean a whole lot if some income classes have changed, but the middle class didn't. For example if the income level of the bottom 20% rose significantly you wouldn't see that in the median, but you would in the average income. Maybe you'd better use the modus.