The graduate’s million-dollar promise

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 16, 2013 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Andrew Vaughan/CP

The message to young people is simple. If you want an extra million dollars, maybe more, just get a university degree. Your lifetime earnings will be at least that much more than those of someone with only a high school education. Or so says the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), quoting the 2006 census.

The university establishment does not lack confidence on this matter. In September 2012, Paul Davidson, president of the AUCC, quoted a more impressive statistic: “While it is true that tuition has increased in recent years, so too has the value of a degree. The income premium of a university degree is large and growing. University graduates will on average earn $1.3 million more during their careers than a high school graduate and $1 million more than a college grad.” Continue…

Income inequality steady by one measure, absolute gains tell another story

By The Canadian Press - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 at 4:27 PM - 0 Comments

Income inequality in Canada has remained steady since 1998 according to the traditional benchmark, but absolute dollar gains by the country’s highest earners have far outstripped the gains by those at the bottom, a report by TD Bank said Tuesday.

Even though the poorest saw a slightly larger percentage gain in income, absolute gains — the amount of dollars in a person’s pocket — tell a different story, said TD Bank chief economist Craig Alexander.

“Although the traditional benchmark of income inequality isn’t showing an increase, the absolute levels of income matter enormously,” he said.

After a 20 per cent increase, the after-inflation level of income of those in the bottom 20 per cent increased to only $15,200 in 2010 from $12,700 in 1998. Continue…

Inequality in America: escalating fast

By Toban Dyck - Friday, October 12, 2012 at 2:35 PM - 0 Comments

“High-income people are doing just fine in this economy,” said Mitt Romney in last week’s U.S. presidential debate. They certainly are. Recent data shows income inequality in America is escalating fast. The income gap, according to new Census Bureau estimates, reached a four-decade high in 2011. The Gini coefficient, a widely used index to gauge wealth distribution, hit 0.47 (zero represents equality, and one represents extreme inequality). The census reports that 1.2 million households in the top one per cent saw an increase of 5.5 per cent in earnings last year, while the 96 million households in the bottom 80 per cent saw a decline of 1.7 per cent in earnings.

Income inequality in the U.S. may now be more severe than it is in China, where the Gini coefficient was calculated at 0.438 in 2010. That figure showed only a slight increase from its 2005 level of 0.425. Observers say this finding suggests the country’s income gap may be stabilizing (though the number is controversial, as the wealthy in China are often reticent to disclose household incomes).

Regardless which country is better or worse, Gini coefficient levels in both China and the U.S. have risen past what the UN calls the “danger level” of 0.40.

The rich keep getting richer. Should we be worried?

By Erica Alini - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 5:41 PM - 132 Comments

Photograph by Flickr user seven_resist

That the gap between rich and poor has been widening in the U.S. and Britain is old news. What’s new, according to a recent OECD report (PDF), is that in the last 30 years the income gap has been growing even faster in unlikely places: Sweden, Denmark and Germany. Despite their notoriously generous welfare systems, the three have seen the split between top and bottom incomes grow faster than anywhere else in the OECD in the past decade. (Canada also registered a sizable increase in its Gini coefficient, the standard measure of income inequality.)

So why are the rich doing disproportionately better than everyone else? The report highlights an interesting trio of possible causes: Continue…

Oily duck, Tasered pork, and apple crumble for desert

By selley - Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 1:25 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Don Martin on the world’s most famous dead ducks; Greg Weston on election financing; Terence Corcoran on the StatsCan war.

Ottawa wants a new drug
The capital is relatively quiet, but the pundits are vexed over heroin, statistical tomfoolery, the quietness itself, Gordon O’Connor (remember him?) and, of course, the old in-and-out.

The Globe and Mail‘s Margaret Wente deems the credentials of Tony Clement’s Insite panel “irreproachable,” saying “they don’t seem to have an axe to grind.” But while their report has been hailed as a vindication of the Vancouver safe-injection site, Wente believes its findings are “at best mixed.” She seems to mean it’s a mixture of the positive (it has prevented some overdose deaths and “increased access to detox and treatment”) with the inconclusive (nobody knows how many deaths or how much of an increase). It’s a little weird that she would consider Insite’s limited reach—it “accounts for less than 5 per cent of all injections in the Downtown Eastside”—a potential negative rather than grounds for expansion, especially since she declares herself a pragmatist when it comes to drugs. Which is bloody odd itself, considering her nonsensical stance on marijuana.

Continue…

Trapped in Jeffrey Simpson’s cocoon of fear

By Chris Selley - Monday, May 5, 2008 at 1:16 PM - 1 Comment

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Scott Taylor on Andrew Leslie; Doug Saunders on Afghan corruption; Greg Weston on waiting 25 years for helicopters; Margaret Wente on Obama; Jeffrey Simpson on productivity.

This is why we can’t have nice debates
The following topics are too contentious for federal politicians to risk talking about, pundits allege: free speech, immigration and productivity. And in the case of the Tories, pretty much everything else too.

Rex Murphy, writing in The Globe and Mail, is amazed that the Tories would be willing to “to declare Bill C-10, dealing with tax-credits that support the making of Canadian films, a matter of confidence,” but not even utter a peep about the “noxious blot on the central dynamic” of Canadian democracy that our various human rights commissions have become. But C-10 is about all sorts of other things too, of course—many of them, we suspect the government would argue, far more important than whether David Cronenberg’s Crash would have received funding under the new regulations. (We suspect a crushing majority of Canadians would agree it shouldn’t have, incidentally, but never mind the rubes.) The Harperites aren’t touching the human rights commissions, we suspect, because talking about them makes Canadians go crazy.

We can’t have a debate about the declining fortunes of immigrants to Canada “because political actors are afraid of alienating ethnic groups,” Jeffrey Simpson writes in the Globe. (We’d suggest it’s more basic: talking about immigration makes Canadians go crazy.) Continue…

Wake us up when we get to the Third World

By selley - Friday, May 2, 2008 at 1:09 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Dan Gardner on gas prices and climate change; Terence Corcoran on the income gap; Daphne Bramham on women in Iraq; Colby Cosh on Albert Hofmann.

Death of the Canadian dream
Statistics Canada’s latest figures on income equality send Canada’s op-ed pages into a highly predictable tizzy. Our kingdom for a universally agreed-upon definition of poverty!

Terence Corcoran, writing in the National Post, accuses StatsCan of fomenting “class warfare” with its news release, which he says focused too heavily on the changes in earnings of individual low-, middle- and high-income Canadians since 1980. “Media Web sites flamed with indignation over the growing rich-poor earnings gap,” he notes, but family income provides, in the words of StatsCan’s media guy, “a better picture” of the real situation. (The report itself has plenty of information about family incomes, for the record.) “In 1980,” Corcoran notes, “the lowest 20% of families had income of $21,134. By 2005, the lowest group earned $24,379, for a gain of $3,245 or 15%.” As such, he suggests cancelling the Les Misérables revival.

Alas, the Toronto Star‘s David Olive already has tickets. Continue…