Make that inequality work mutually

"There is plenty of speculation on these possibilities, but a lot of it has been aimed at elevating one political agenda over another rather than elevating our understanding. As a result, there’s more confusion about this issue than just about any other in contemporary American political discourse. The reality is that most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize. 

It is pretty easy to convince a lot of Americans that unemployment and poverty are social problems because discrete examples of both are visible on the evening news, or maybe even in or at the periphery of one’s own life. It’s much harder to get those same people worked up about generalized measures of inequality." 

From Prof Tyler Cowen’s The Inequality That Matters 

Postscript: Don’t forget to read his other piece on Anti-Capitalist Rerun- The End of Poverty 

• Slumdog Millionaire certainly sold tickets; it’s not entirely clear if one of the reasons it has done so well in the United States is that it also sold the Horatio Alger line. The film has come under substantial criticism, most of all from India, for the latter. Numerous and sometimes contradictory charges have been leveled against it, ranging from “we’re not all poor” to “the poor can’t rise to be rich” to “Indian cinema handled that theme a long time ago.”