More on Income Inequality

In response to Michael's post: we've discussed income inequality before, here and here for example.  My brief reaction is that Catholic thought regards absolute deprivation of the poor as the most serious problem, followed by a lack of economic mobility, and income inequality in itself as only third in the list of problems.  But large or increasing income inequality is a matter of some concern in itself for a few reasons that I tried to argue in the first link above: (1) it can strain the bonds of solidarity (as people of wildly different incomes lead lives incomprehensible to each other); (2) it prima facie makes economic mobility more difficult (as the spread from one level to the next higher becomes greater); (3) and it can hurt the poor through what economist Robert Frank has called "expenditure cascades" (in which high expenditures by the wealthy raise the bar for what modest-income people must pay -- and not through mere envy, but because those expenditures become part of society's expectations).

It's hard to respond to RIck's post because the WSJ article is only available to paying subscribers.

Tom