Lexington: Living with inequality

by / Thursday, 30 July 2015 / Published in Economy

UK Only Article: 
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The $1-a-week school

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Lexington

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What a good, more unequal America might look like

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AS AN adornment to the many academic studies of income inequality, Lexington is compiling a miscellany of spurious anecdotes about the very rich. Entries should, ideally, sound plausible but turn to dust after a few phone calls. Recent additions to the collection include the cash bonuses supposedly paid to high-performing wives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and the letters supposedly signed by senators recommending infants to the admissions officers of Washington kindergartens. This endeavour may sound frivolous, and it probably is, but what people are prepared to believe about the doings of the very rich is a measure of the distance between the observers and the observed.
The presidential election in 2016 will be the first to take place since economists began scrutinising tax returns to measure the increase in pre-tax …
Source: The Economy

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